In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  In a little while the baby-sitter brought Jason home. I put him into his playpen and put the television set on to keep him company. He had liked to watch it right from the beginning, giving equal attention to Captain Kangaroo and the 6 o’clock news.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and looked through the window at the gray winter sky. I stared at the sky, expecting it to break up into images, erupt into ideas, but there was no change at all.

  The telephone rang. It was my mother and father. They always call together because my father is retired from the Post Office and because they have an extra telephone extension in their apartment. “Hello,” they chorused. My mother uses the kitchen phone and my father lies on their bed. He takes off his shoes and his feet in their black nylon socks form a vee that he looks through while he talks. “How are tricks?” he asked, and I rustled up what sounded like a chuckle.

  “So-so,” I told him. “I’m having a little trouble with my poetry.”

  “Did that queen-size sheet fit the bed?” my mother asked.

  “What sheet?” my father demanded. Since his retirement, he tries to keep up with all the domestic issues. “Did you send the children a sheet?”

  “Don’t you remember?” my mother said impatiently.

  I said, “I can’t seem to just sit down and write anymore.”

  “What are you having for dinner?” my mother asked.

  “We’re having veal cutlets,” my father said. “Your mother is going to bake them. I just scrubbed the potatoes.”

  “Your father likes to eat the skin.”

  After we said good-bye and hung up, I set the table. I noticed that the patch of sky had grown darker. There still wasn’t a poem in sight. Ezra Pound said to “make it new.” Oh, easy for him, I thought. He never lived in Queens.

  Soon I heard the whine of the elevator and Howard was home. “And how is Emily Dickinson doing today?” he asked. I knew it was only meant as a playful and good-hearted greeting.

  But then I said, “It’s all well and good for you to ask how I am. It’s just terrific. Why don’t you fix that faucet in the bathroom instead? I have begged you to clean that crap out of the hall closet. You never do anything I ask you! You never do anything! We’ll rot in this stupid apartment!”

  Jason began to wail. “My God!” Howard said.

  “What’s wrong?” He kissed me on the neck and wrists and on my breasts through the apron, to soothe me. I sat on his lap and told him about the day, about the lost poems.

  Then he carried the baby to his high chair and we sat down at the table and ate the lamb chops and yams. When I brought out the Jell-O shimmering in its bowl, Howard exclaimed over the bananas as if they were glittering coins discovered at the bottom of the sea.

  After supper he said he would go to the hardware store and get a washer to fix the leaking faucet. But I wouldn’t let him. I would get after the superintendent to fix it tomorrow. Instead we put Jason to bed and we washed the dishes. Then we lay down together for our nightly ritual. He talked this time, and I listened in silent penance, to another episode in his marriage to poor, confused Renee. Then we made love, starting right there, but finishing under the rough white sky of the bedroom ceiling, and Annie was conceived.

  10

  MY FATHER-IN-LAW HAD CHEST pains, and he and Howard’s mother decided to move to Florida. “He’ll bake it out down there,” she said. “He’ll be all right. We’re going to start fresh with new furniture and new dishes.” She promised to give us all the stuff they couldn’t sell.

  “They die like flies down there,” my mother said. “The ambulances come in the night to the back doors, without sirens. They cart you away, dead or alive.”

  One down and one to go, I thought, remembering Renee. I was so happy to see them leave that I didn’t even mind the discards: the china that was missing cups, the silverware without tablespoons. “Who eats soup anymore?” Howard’s mother said, pressing them on us.

  Howard went back and forth with the car, stocking up. Our apartment was becoming a museum to their lives. Things didn’t match: odd curtains, one-of-a-kind table napkins. “Why did you take this?” I asked. But I was being too demanding. Who said I had to live in a world of symmetry? They were going, that was what mattered.

  “Take the lusterware vase on the hall table,” my mother advised.

  “I’ve always hated it.”

  “But lusterware’s on the way back.”

  “We’ll be scattered like refugees,” Howard’s mother said, on the eve of departure. “My son all the way up here, my daughter on the other coast. If it wasn’t for him, I’d never go. I’ve had to buy six pairs of white shoes.”

  “This is the jet age,” Howard said. “We could be together in minutes.”

  “God forbid,” his mother said.

  “A hundred and twenty in the shade,” my mother whispered. “They turn to shoe leather. Skin cancer is treated in drugstores.”

  Howard’s father had chest pains. “It’s that pie,” Howard’s mother said. “That pie didn’t look fresh to me. I told you not to eat that pie.”

  “Don’t give me the canister set,” I said. “Don’t give me the shepherd and shepherdess lamps. Send them to Beverly in California. They may have sentimental value.”

  Howard’s mother looked at the baby critically as if he was the one going to Florida. “His eye looks worse,” she said.

  Howard’s father was short of breath at the airport. “He’ll feel better down there,” Howard’s mother said. “He’ll get himself in shape. Like you, Howie. He’s like an ox, this kid.” Then she said, “Give me a boost, hon. Once more for old time’s sake. One hand only. I am still my bridal weight.”

  “They can have Florida,” my mother said. “They can keep it. They can give it back to the Indians.”

  My father looked at girlie magazines. When he saw me, he moved to the paperbacks. “I’m keeping out of the way,” he said.

  “Do you have your tickets?” Howard asked. “Do you have your Dramamine?”

  The grandparents passed the baby around like a volleyball.

  We went to the Ladies’ Room. There was no paper in my mother’s booth. “Yoo hoo,” she said, and her wriggling hand appeared near my feet.

  “Takeoff is going to be delayed,” Howard said, reading the arrivals and departures board.

  A flight from Arizona came in. Men marched down the ramp wearing cowboy hats and string ties, their tans fading fast.

  We all walked together to Gate 6. The plane was taxiing into position. My father eyed the gilded wings on the lapel of a reservations clerk. “You fellows must have nerves of steel, taking those babies up,” my father said.

  Howard’s mother gripped Howard in a half nelson. “It’s so final!” she cried.

  “The Indians wouldn’t take it either,” my mother said.

  “Do you have everything? Do you have your boarding passes?”

  “Nobody applies for senior citizenship,” my father said.

  Good-bye, good-bye, for heaven’s sake. I waved the baby’s little hand as they were sucked into the funnel.

  “Who got the lusterware vase?” my mother asked.

  11

  IN ONE OF OUR night talks, Howard told me that he had first met Renee at the shoemaker’s. She was sitting in one of those little booths, waiting to have a loosened heel glued back onto her shoe. She had been thinking about suicide that day, she told him later. He had come from an all-night jam session, feeling elated but rocky with fatigue.

  Howard sat down in the booth next to hers. He was going to have his shoes resoled, thinking he’d have a short snooze while he waited. She looked so pathetic sitting there, her hands in her lap, her bare feet resting one on top of the other on the little plush stool. At first he thought she was a child, a war waif perhaps who might break her clouded face with a smile any moment and say, “Chocolate, soldier?”

  He shut his eyes, but he thought he could feel her staring at him. He was right. As soon as he looked
back, her own eyes glanced away, and she blushed and let her fingers flutter around her face. Her feet looked blue. “Are your feet cold?” Howard asked.

  “No,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know. They’re always that color.”

  Howard wanted to rub them, to buy her chocolate and new shoes. But he couldn’t stay awake. He smiled an apology, folded his arms and dozed. When he woke, his shoes were ready and the girl in the other booth was gone. He remembered her blue feet, how thin she was.

  A few days later he met her at the supermarket. Her basket was almost empty. She was buying brewer’s yeast and Postum and a can of sardines. The few items in her cart rattled pathetically. As Howard walked behind her, he assessed her. She looked half-starved. Her eyeglasses, which were taped together at the hinge, slipped down her nose. He wondered idly how she’d look if she gained a few pounds, if she’d let her hair down. Her clothes seemed to belong to someone else.

  He took her out for lunch and she told him about her suicide plans. She bit into her sandwich, sipped her malted noisily, and said she was thinking of ending it all.

  “But why?” Howard asked.

  Well, she was probably dying of cancer anyway.

  He was horrified. No wonder she was so thin, no wonder her feet had been so blue! “Have you seen a doctor?” Howard asked.

  Oh, doctors! She waved them away with one hand while she licked mayonnaise from the fingers of the other. What did they know? When Renee’s mother had first been pregnant with her, a doctor had diagnosed a thyroid condition. Doctors killed more people than they saved—didn’t he know that—and the A.M.A. covered it up. But yes, she had been to a doctor and he said there was nothing wrong with her, except maybe her diet. But how could she eat better if she was dying of cancer? And besides, she was running out of money. She had come to New York from Baltimore to go to secretarial school. She had learned to take dictation in those little squiggly symbols. She had learned to type sixty words per minute. As promised, the school had arranged jobs for all the graduates. But something always went wrong. She typed fast, but she made a lot of mistakes. Dear Sri, she typed. Yours Turly. People were crazy in New York, they were so fussy. Everyone was in such a hurry. She was almost hit by a car every time she crossed the street. She coughed into her paper napkin. Howard looked at it, surreptitiously, thinking he might see blood.

  “How were you going to do it?” he asked.

  She shrugged. She had trouble swallowing pills—a tricky gag reflex. She supposed she could always chew up a few bottles of those orange- or cherry-flavored ones for kids. Or take gas, maybe. If it wasn’t disconnected for nonpayment. She could jump off the roof, but with her luck she’d probably be mugged on the way up.

  “How come she was having her shoe fixed if she was planning on killing herself?” I asked.

  Howard didn’t know. He’d offered to buy her another sandwich. He took her back to his place and she wore his bathrobe for three days, her arms lost halfway up the sleeves, its hem trailing behind her like a bridal train.

  “You’re so good to me,” she said. “You’ve saved my life. I would have had to do something drastic or maybe even go back to Baltimore. But I’m not going to get in your way.”

  So he married her.

  12

  THERE WAS NO QUESTION about it. Howard was the beauty in our family. I didn’t mind. What’s wrong, I told myself, with a little role reversal? What’s so bad about a male sex object, for a change? That ability to sprout hair like dark fountains, the flat, tapering planes of their buttocks and hips, and oh, those hands, and erections pointing the way to bed like road markers.

  Besides, I had my own good points, not the least of them my disposition. Sunny and radiant, I woke with the same dumb abundance of hope every day. The bed always seemed too small to contain both me and the expansion of joy.

  Sometimes Howard was depressed. It had nothing to do with me, with us, he said. It was just the way he was. But I did the best I could to cheer him up anyway, to tease and love him out of it. On some sad Sundays we drove out to Westchester or Long Island to look at model homes. It wasn’t that we wanted to live in the suburbs, in that awful sterile sameness. How we laughed and poked one another at the roped-off bedrooms hung in velvet, at the plastic chickens roosting in warm refrigerators. But for some reason we believed that the long drive out of the city, the ordered march through un-lived-in rooms, restored him. Finally it became a standard treatment for Howard’s depression. Places like that only confirmed our confidence in our own choices.

  Lenny and Judy Miller had moved to the suburbs, to a hi-ranch house in Port Washington, and one Saturday afternoon we were invited to a barbecue. Our second baby, unmarked by anybody’s sins, was in Jason’s old car bed on the back seat. And Jason, a tragic deposed king, stood alongside her, peering out the window. His feet had been corrected and his eye hardly turned in anymore, except when he was tired. But now he was newly cursed with this gorgeous intruder who was his sister and his roommate through no design of his own. I thought I knew how Jason felt; Annie had turned us into a ménage à trois, Howard and I having been a single love object for so long. Jason was being forced to grow-up quickly or else, to make room for someone even rosier and sweeter than himself. He watched as I bathed Annie, his gaze focused where her missing parts should have been. Was he next?

  “Do you love the new baby?” people asked, and poor Jason smiled and hid his murderous rage and fear. Howard tried to give him extra attention. They went around like primates; Jason curled on Howard’s neck, his legs would around his father’s chest, his glance sly with pleasure.

  We were a family of four now, encapsulated against the world, riding in our blue car on the Long Island Expressway.

  Judy and Lenny had had a second daughter, a toddler now, and she and Roberta were waiting on the front lawn for us. As our car pulled into their driveway, they ran screaming our arrival to their parents.

  Then they were all standing together in front of their house, like the people in one of those ads for mortgage insurance. (If something happened to you, could they still live like this?) There was even a large, shaggy dog, dancing and barking his frantic joy at their feet.

  We were given the guided tour. Each of the little girls had her own bedroom. And there was a den besides, with a large television set overseeing the room from one corner. Judy had a row of shining new appliances and she opened them quickly, one after another, for our inspection. All I saw was a dazzle of light and chrome and color.

  We couldn’t walk in their backyard yet. The lawn had just been seeded, and the dark earth freshly turned. The barbecue was set up on the other side of the house, and just a few yards away the family next door was setting up theirs, the other husband aproned like Lenny. The two men waved to one another, and the thin stream of smoke rising from each barbecue seemed like another friendly salute between neighboring tribes.

  I had to admit to myself that it was nice out there, in a pastoral sense. You can’t hate nature, after all; not those sweet flower faces and the benevolent shade of, the few old trees the builder had left.

  Lenny was turning the hamburgers and steak and explaining the benefits of owning a house, in much the same way he had urged natural childbirth on us only a few years ago. We were always one step behind them in our social development, and I knew they relished this role of leadership.

  “Equity,” Lenny said. “That’s the key word. It’s like money in the bank. Real estate can only rise in value.”

  “But it’s the bank that actually owns the house, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Only the mortgage,” Lenny explained. “It gets reduced over the years, while the house increases in resale value. No fat landlord is going to get rich on me anymore.”

  I looked at Howard, and saw that he had that glazed look he gets sometimes in the presence of salesmen. Judy ran in and out with platters of food, declining help from everyone. The children eyed one another.

  “Show Jason your toys,” Judy instructed
Roberta, who ran immediately to the other side of the house. “Mine,” their baby announced, grabbing a ravaged doll from the ground, and clutching it to her chest.

  Jason blinked, moving closer to Howard.

  Judy whispered, gesturing toward her neighbors. “He’s an orthodontist. She’s a reading specialist. Very nice family.”

  The orthodontist turned his hamburgers; his wife shooed flies from the salad.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” Lenny said. “And the crime rate is zero. Could you imagine unlocked doors? No elevators to break down? No pollution? No muggings?”

  I looked at Howard again, wanting to exchange a glance of trust with him against the seduction of Lenny’s pitch. But he was gently trying to release Jason’s prehensile hold on his leg. “Play with Roberta,” he said, but Roberta was nowhere in sight.

  It was peaceful all right; only the birds and a distant song of trucks from the parkway. No sirens, no slamming doors, no screams. The hamburgers were delicious, smoky and juicy and we sat in dappled sunlight to eat them. Jason had taken off his shoes and was running barefoot now with other children who had gathered on the new grass in front of the house. The baby, who usually had to be rocked into oblivion, slept in that pure air as if she had been drugged.

  “See?” Judy said.

  Yet I felt an invasion of sadness. It was as if I had suddenly gone deaf or senseless, as if I had been cruelly cut off from the mainstream of life. I didn’t want any drastic changes yet, no further threat to the unit that was us, in our city tower among towers. I didn’t want to grow old, either, or to die, and there was a lurking specter of death in all this silence and safety and sunshine. It was the same reassuring lie of manicured cemeteries without markers.

  Howard would know about that intuitively, I thought. But he and Lenny were heading for the basement where Howard would be instructed in the mechanical workings of the house. Pipes and valves and current boxes, those lures that could be traced back to his first erector set, and extravagant maternal praise.