She was forty-six when she gave birth to the last, and he was eighteen and on a weekend home from college when he recognized, for the first time in his life, what the sighs and the stirrings coming from his parents’ bedroom on that Saturday morning actually signified. (He did a quick calculation of their ages, just to be sure he had it right, and then thought, Still?, amazed and a little daunted.) For the rest of the weekend, he imagined ways he might rib them about it, although he couldn’t bring himself to come out with anything, knowing full well that even the most good-natured mention of what went on behind their bedroom door could get him the back of his father’s hand—or, worse yet, cause a blush to rise from his own cheeks well before he’d managed to raise any kind of glow in theirs.
And there was the Christmas, some years later, when one of them had given their parents a nostalgic collection of forties music and, listening to Bing Crosby sing in his slow, sleepy way, “Kiss me once and kiss me twice (and kiss me once again),” hadn’t their mother said, for all assembled to hear, “If you don’t turn this off, I’m going to have to find a place to be alone with your father.” And hadn’t he and his siblings, every one of them well versed by then in matters of love and sex, sat dumbfounded, calculating, no doubt…seventy-one, seventy-two…still?
Shades of the trouble with the couch, she took her husband’s hand in his last days and unbuttoned her blouse and didn’t seem to care a bit who saw her, doctor or nurse, son or daughter or grandchild—or older sister who’d never married herself and couldn’t help but say, out in the waiting room, “Now, really.” She leaned forward, now and again, to whisper to him, even after he was well past hearing, her open lips brushing both the surgical tape that secured the respirator in his mouth and the stubbly gray beard of his cheek.
Growing plump in her widowhood, though she was the first to admit she’d never been what you would call thin, she traveled in busloads of retirees—mostly widows, although there was the occasional man or two—only missing a museum trip or a foliage tour or a luncheon (with a cocktail) at this or that historic site or country inn if a grandchild was in need of minding. What she could do best—her own daughters marveled at it, who else would have the patience—was sit for hours and hours at a time with a colicky baby over her shoulder or a worn-out toddler on her knee and talk or sing. She told nonsense stories, more sound than substance, or sang every tune in her lifetime repertoire, from Beatles songs to ancient hymns, hypnotizing the children somehow (her sons and daughters were sure of it) into sleep, or sometimes just a dazed contentedness, tucked under her arm or under her chin, seconds, minutes, then hours ticking by, the bars of summer or winter, late-afternoon or early-morning sunlight moving across them, across the length of a room, and neither of them, adult or child, seeming to mark the time gone by.
But take a look in your freezer after she’s gone, the daughters reported to one another and to the better-liked sisters-in-law as well. Nearly a full gallon eaten—or all but a final spoonful so she didn’t have to put the carton in the trash and give herself away. She’s welcome to it, of course, but at her age it’s a weight thing. She needs to watch her weight. It’s the deceptiveness, too, don’t you see. What does she eat when she’s alone?
Alone, in an apartment now, ever since the night a stranger crept up the breezeway, broke the kitchen window, and made off with her purse, the portable TV, and the boxed silver in the dining room, which had been her mother’s, she licked chocolate pudding from the back of a spoon, sherbet, gelato, sorbet, ice cream, of course. She scraped the sides of the carton, ran a finger around the rim.
On visits to her out-of-state children she’d get up in the night, stand by the light of the refrigerator, take a few tablespoons from the gallon, or a single ice-cream bar, but always end up going back for more. A daughter-in-law found her one morning, 2 A.M., with the last chocolate/vanilla ice-cream cup and a tiny wooden spoon—leftovers from the grandchild’s birthday party she had made the trip specifically to attend—and gave her such a lecture, as she put it when she got home, that you’d think she’d been shooting heroin.
It was the weight that concerned them, said her children, conferring. They were afraid it was the weight that was keeping her these days from those senior trips she used to love, from the winter vacations in Florida she’d once looked forward to. Now that the grandchildren were grown out of the need for a sitter, she should be doing more of those things, not fewer. They solicited a talking-to for their mother from her doctor, who instead reminded them all that she was past eighty and healthy enough and free to do, or not do, what she liked.
They took to stopping by to see her, on lunch hours, or before going to the grocery store, keeping their car keys in their hands, and urging her to turn off the television, to plan something, to do something. Her grandchildren, driving cars now, asked her out to their kinds of places, treated her to frothy lattes topped with whipped cream that would repeat on her the rest of the afternoon and on into the evening, despite bicarbs and antacids, until she brought herself to tell them when they called, “Thank you, dear, but I’m quite content at home.”
Peach, strawberry, and reliable vanilla. Rocky road and butter pecan and mint chocolate chip. Looking at ninety and still, still, the last thing she feels at the end of each day is that longing to wrap her legs around him, around someone. The pleasure of the taste, of loading up a spoon and finishing it bit by bit, and then taking another spoonful and another—one kind of pleasure, enhanced by stealth and guilt, when it is someone else’s carton, someone else’s home in the middle of the night, another kind when it’s her own and she carries her bowl, in full light, to the couch before the television in the living room. Forbidden youthful passion and domestic married love, something like that, anyway, if you want to extrapolate. If you want to begin with the ice-cream dishes licked clean by a girl who is now the old woman past all usefulness, closing her eyes at the first taste. If you want to make a metaphor out of her lifelong cravings, something she is not inclined to do. Pleasure is pleasure. A remnant of strawberries, a young man’s hands, a newborn in your arms, or your own child’s changing face. Your lips to the familiar stubble of your husband’s cheek. Your tongue to the last vein of fudge in the empty carton. Pleasure is pleasure. If you have an appetite for it, you’ll find there’s plenty. Plenty to satisfy you—lick the back of the spoon. Take another, and another. Plenty. Never enough.
2002
THE BUTCHER’S WIFE
LOUISE ERDRICH
Here’s an odd and paradoxical truth: A man’s experience of happiness can later kill him. Though he appeared to be no more than an everyday drunk, Delphine Watzka’s father, Roy, was more. He was a dangerous romantic. In his life, he had loved deeply, even selflessly, with all the profound gratitude of a surprised Pole. But the woman he had loved and married, Minnie Watzka, née Kust, now existed only in the person of her daughter, Delphine, and in photographs. Minnie had died when Delphine was very young, and afterward Roy indulged in a worship of those photographs. Some nights, he lit a line of votive candles on the dresser and drank steadily and spoke to Minnie until, from deep in his cups, she answered.
During the first years after Minnie’s death, Roy bounced in and out of drink with the resilience of a man with a healthy liver. He remained remarkably sloshed even through Prohibition by becoming ecumenical. Hair tonic, orange-flower water, cough syrups of all types, even women’s monthly elixirs fueled his grieving rituals. Gradually, he destroyed the organ he’d mistaken for his heart. By the time Delphine reached her twelfth year, her father’s need to drink was produced less by her mother’s memory than by the drink itself. After that, she knew her father mainly as a pickled wreck. Home was chaos. Now Delphine was a grown woman and he was completely failing. In the spring of 1936, she quit secretarial school and moved back from the Twin Cities to their Minnesota farm to care for him.
As Delphine walked into town for supplies, she thought of her mother. She possessed only one tiny locket photo of Minnie
, and while she was away she had found herself missing the other photographs. It was in that fit of longing to see her mother’s face that Delphine entered Waldvogel’s Meats, and met Eva Waldvogel.
The first true meeting of their minds was over lard.
“I’ll take half a pound,” Delphine said. She was mentally worn out by her father’s insistence that since he was dying anyway he might as well kill himself more pleasurably with schnapps. All day long he’d been drunk underneath the mulberry trees, laughing to himself and trying to catch the fruit in his mouth. He was now stained purple with the juice.
“There’s lard and there is lard.” Eva reached into the glass case that was cooled by an electric fan. “My husband was trained back in Germany as a master butcher, and he uses a secret process to render his fat. Taste,” she commanded, holding out a small pan. Delphine swiped a bit with the tip of her finger.
“Pure as butter!”
“We don’t salt it much,” Eva whispered, as though this were not for just anyone to overhear. “But it won’t keep unless you have an icebox.”
“I don’t have one,” Delphine admitted. “Well, I did, but my dad sold it while I was away.”
“Who is he, may I ask?”
Delphine liked Eva’s direct but polite manners and admired her thick bun of bronze-red hair stuck through with two yellow lead pencils. Eva’s eyes were a very pale, washed-out blue with flecks of green. There was, in one eye, an odd golden streak that would turn black when the life finally left her body, like a light going out behind the crack in a door.
“Roy Watzka,” Delphine said slowly.
Eva nodded. The name seemed to tell her all that she needed to know. “Come back here.” Eva swept her arm around the counter. “I’ll teach you to make a mincemeat pie better than you’ve ever eaten. It’s all in the goddam suet.”
Delphine went behind the counter, past an office cascading with papers and bills, past little cupboards full of clean aprons and rags, and a knickknack shelf displaying figures made of German porcelain. She and Eva entered the kitchen, which was full of light from big windows set into the thick walls. Here, for Delphine, all time stopped. As she took in the room, she experienced a profound and fabulous expansion of being.
There was a shelf for big clay bread bowls and a pull-out bin containing flour. Wooden cupboards painted an astounding green matched the floor’s linoleum. A heavy, polished meat grinder was bolted to the counter. The round table was covered with a piece of oilcloth with squares. In each red-trimmed square was printed a bunch of blue grapes or a fat pink-gold peach, an apple or a delicate green pear. On the windowsills, pots of geraniums bloomed, scarlet and ferociously cheerful.
Suddenly extremely happy, Delphine sat in a solid, square-backed chair while Eva spooned roasted coffee beans into a grinder and then began to grind them. A wonderful fragrance emerged. Delphine took a huge breath. Eva, her hands quick and certain, dumped the thin wooden drawer full of fresh grounds into a pale-blue speckled enamel coffeepot. She got water from a faucet in her sink, instead of from a pump, and then she put the coffee on the stove and lit the burner of a stunning white gas range with chrome trim swirled into the words “Magic Chef.”
“My God,” Delphine breathed. She couldn’t speak. But that was fine, for Eva had already whipped one of the pencils out of her hair and taken up a pad of paper to set down the mincemeat recipe. Eva spoke English very well but her writing was of the old, ornate German style, and she wasn’t a good speller. Delphine was grateful for this tiny flaw, for Eva appeared so fantastically skilled a being, so assured—she was also the mother of two sturdy and intelligent sons—that she would have been an unapproachable paragon to Delphine otherwise. Delphine—who had never really had a mother, much less a sister, who cleaned up shameful things in her father’s house, who had been toughened by cold and hunger and was regarded as beneath notice by the town’s best society, and yet could spell—stole confidence from the misspelled recipe.
The next time Delphine visited the Waldvogels’ store, she noted the jangle of a cheerful shop bell. She imagined that it was only the first of many times that she would ring the bell as she entered the shop. This did not prove to be the case. By the next time Delphine came to the shop, she had already attained a status so familiar that she entered by the back door.
Delphine placed her order, as before, and, as before, Eva asked her to come in and sit down for a coffee. There was no cleanser on Eva’s shelf that would be strong enough for the work Delphine had to do to make Roy’s place habitable again, and Eva wanted to concoct something of her own.
“First off, a good vinegar-and-water washdown. Then I should order the industrial-strength ammonia for you, only be careful with the fumes. Maybe, if that doesn’t work, a very raw lye.”
Delphine shook her head. She was smitten with shame, and could not tell Eva that she was afraid her father might try to drink the stuff. Eva sipped her coffee. Today, her hair was bound back in a singular knot, in the shape of a figure eight, which Delphine knew was the ancient sign for eternity. Eva rose and turned away, walked across the green squares of linoleum to punch down the risen dough. As Delphine watched, a strange notion popped into her head, the idea that perhaps the most strongly experienced moments—such as this one, when Eva turned, and the sun met her hair, and for that one instant the symbol blazed out—those particular moments were eternal. They actually went somewhere—into a file of moments that existed beyond time’s range and could not be pilfered by God.
Well, it was God, wasn’t it, Delphine went on stubbornly, who had made time and thereby created the end of everything? Tell me this, Delphine wanted to say to her new friend, why are we given the curse of imagining eternity when we can’t experience it, when we ourselves are so finite? She wanted to say it, but suddenly grew shy, and it was in that state of concentrated inattention that she first met Eva’s husband, Fidelis Waldvogel, Master Butcher.
Before she actually met him, she sensed him, like a surge of electric power in the air when the clouds are low. Then she felt a heaviness. A field of gravity moved through her body. She was trying to rise, to shake the feeling, when he suddenly filled the doorway.
It was not his size. He was not extraordinarily tall or broad. But he shed power, as though there were a bigger man crammed into him. One thick hand hung down at his side like a hook; the other balanced on his shoulder a slab of meat. That cow’s haunch weighed perhaps a hundred pounds or double that. He held it lightly, although the veins in his neck throbbed, heavy-blooded as a bull’s. He looked at Delphine, and his eyes were white-blue. Their stares locked. Delphine’s cheeks went fever red, and she looked down first. Clouds moved across the sun, and the red mouths of the geraniums on the windowsill yawned. The shock of his gaze caused her to pick up one of Eva’s cigarettes. To light it. He looked away from her and conversed with his wife. Then he left without asking to be introduced.
That abruptness, though rude, was more than fine with Delphine. Already, she didn’t want to know him. She hoped that she could avoid him. It didn’t matter, so long as she could still be friends with Eva, and hold the job that she soon was offered, waiting on customers.
So it was. From then on, Delphine used the back door, which led past the furnace and the washtubs, the shelves of tools, the bleached aprons slowly drying on racks and hooks. She walked down the hallway cluttered with papers and equipment and lifted from a hook by the shop door the apron Eva had given her, blue with tiny white flowers. From then on, she heard the customer bell ring from the other side of the counter.
Within a week, Delphine had met most of the regular customers. Then she met Tante Marie-Christine, who was not a customer but Fidelis’s sister. One afternoon, Tante swept in with just one clang of the bell, as though the bell itself had been muted by her elegance. She went right around to the case that held the sausage, wrenched it open, fished out a ring of the best bologna, and put it in her purse. Delphine stood back and watched—actually, she stood back and envi
ed the woman’s shoes. They were made of a thin, flexible Italian leather and were cleverly buttoned. They fit Tante’s rather long, narrow feet with a winsome precision. She might not have had a captivating face—for she resembled her brother, replicated his powerful neck and too-stern chin, and the eyes that on him were commanding on her were a ghostly blue that gave Delphine the shivers—but her feet were slim and pretty. She was vain about them, and all her shoes were made of the most expensive leather.
“Who are you?” Tante asked, rearing her head back and then swirling off in her fur coat without deigning to accept an answer. The question hung in the air long after Tante had gone back to invade Eva’s kitchen. “Who are you?” is a question with a long answer or a short answer. When Tante dropped it in the air like that, Delphine was left to consider its larger meaning as she scrubbed down the meat counters and prepared to mop the floor.
Who are you, Delphine Watzka, you drunkard’s child, you dropout secretary, you creature with a belly of steel and a heart that longs for a mother? Who are you, what are you—born a dirty Pole in a Polack’s dirt? You with a cellar full of empty bottles and a stewed father lying on the floor? What makes you think you belong anywhere near this house, this shop, and especially my brother Fidelis, who is the master of all that he does?
When Tante swept back out with a loaf of her sister-in-law’s fresh bread under her arm and grabbed a bottle of milk, Delphine wrote it all down on a slip: “Tante took a bottle of milk, a ring of number-one bologna, and a loaf of bread.” And she left it at that. When Tante found out that Delphine had written the items down, she was furious. Tante didn’t take things. By her reckoning, she was owed things. She had once given her brother five hundred dollars to purchase equipment, and although he had paid her back she continued to take the interest out in ways that were intended to remind him of her dutiful generosity.
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