Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid

by Judith Rossner

  I’ll have to come back before too long because some of the information I need still isn’t here. I keep stumbling on the goddamn details. I’ve never bothered with details, as you know, and that supposedly adds to the power of my stuff although in the old days every time I published a book some carping little academic bastard made sure to point out that if I did know what my hero looked like I was keeping it a secret. Anyhow. The symbols of the sixties have the purity of the Greek myths—Vietnam, the Blacks—while the symbols of the thirties were tied up in a thousand tricky little arguments and philosophies which only became purified in later years, the Peekskill riots being one of the better examples. I’m using the time-machine bit—right now I’m trying to work out a chapter called Love- stone and Shachtman Take a Trip—but I keep getting bogged down in details. In the thirties all the healthiest symbols—i.e. the Spanish Civil War—end up getting shot to hell and all that you’re left with is betrayal. Betrayals are a dime a dozen. They bore me. My old man, who for some reason I suddenly wish you could meet although I’m sure you never will, it’s all I can do to get the poor old bastard to see me once in a while, I make him uncomfortable . . . my old man gets tears in his eyes when he looks at the American flag and that single fact about him makes him more interesting to me than all the Josh Cohen-Canes in the world. I suppose that sounds pretty obvious and predictable but my feeling for the two set aside, I could probably make out a pretty good case that loyalty is more interesting than treason because the mental contortions it requires are far more complex, it’s far more difficult to justify the actions of those you love than to simply betray them by loving elsewhere.

  It is easier to betray than to remain loyal.

  It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time.

  It’s harder to stay where you are than to get out. (For everyone but you, that is.)

  Myrna knocked around when she was in Vincennes and it was the hardest thing in the world for her to come back and she nearly didn’t do it. I think I told you the way she was driving when she picked me up. The first thing I asked her was if she was trying to kill herself, why’d she have to kill the kid, too, and she didn’t deny it but said, “Why not? Do you have a better idea?” I couldn’t answer her. It takes a certain dumb arrogance to tell someone else to go on living. I just said if she wanted to kill herself she could let us both out of the car and I’d look after the kid.

  “What makes you such a big public benefactor?” she asked. I said I wasn’t, I just liked kids, I especially liked them better than I liked crazy broads that try to smash them up in cars. Then she pulled over to the side of the road and said if I was just going to bitch at her the rest of the way, I could do the driving.

  The setup here is pretty good for me. We have a floor-through in one of those raunchy Greek Revival jobs that makes Vincennes superficially distinguishable from the rest of Indiana. I work in the kitchen right where all the action is—I’d- forgotten how good it was to work that way, how easily words came when I was in the middle of a barracks—with Myrna working and washing dishes if she’s home (she got a job in a laundromat a couple of weeks ago) and Steve hanging around. He’s a funny kid, tight and quiet, but with plenty inside. He watches me writing the way old ladies watch an artist at the seashore. As if any minute he’ll be able to look at the paper and see what I’ve been up to. Once when I looked up he was staring at my beard as if the words were coming out of it. I made some joke to that effect but I only succeeded in throwing him for a loop. He doesn’t know from jokes, this kid, he only knows . . . I make it a point to be serious with him now . . . anyway, in Vincennes the juiciest puns come off like farts in an echo chamber.

  Don’t write to me. I’m not ready for you to write to me yet. I’ll let you know when I’m coming and then all you’ll have to do is let me know if I shouldn’t come, that is, if anyone’s there beside the three of you.

  Meanwhile strangers began coming around. I would walk past the farm and see a car parked in the bushes on one of the dirt roads and two men in business suits standing near it, looking around them. Men with surveying instruments claimed to be lost when I asked if I could help them. A couple with children in the back of the car pulled up beside me on the road and asked if I knew anything about the farmhouse. A tightening network. I told Mimi and she said that I had become overly suspicious. But she did attend the next two town board meetings, although I first had to persuade her that no matter what happened with Josh, a highway right outside our drive would be as much a horror as it would have been five years or five months before. She came home from the meeting more absorbed in the fact that several people had failed to recognize her because of the weight she’d put on than in anything else, and I had to press her to find out that the road had come up and the Mayor had suggested they postpone real consideration since they didn’t have the Planning Board’s report yet.

  “I had a feeling he might be stalling just because I’d turned up for the meeting,” Mimi said—but without indignation. “During the question period I asked him why they needed a new report when last year’s report said they could make it faster but not safer because all the twists and curves are too basic. And he just smiled in that sort of charming-disarming way of his and said they liked to keep up to date, but I had a feeling that if I hadn’t been there, or one of the others, they might have slipped something through.” She laughed ruefully. “I suppose I should be glad he recognized me. The town clerk didn’t. Of course my hair’s longer, maybe that’s part of it But it’s not the whole thing, my face is as round as a . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t stop gaining weight. The doctor said I’ve already gained more than I should gain in the whole pregnancy.”

  She just sort of slid from one subject to the other, as though they were of equal importance. They were, to her. At best. There is a small oval area up at one point near the mailbox, created by a slight outward bulge of the land, obviously the sort of bulge that would be first to be straightened out when a road was modernized. In that oval, which is no more than six feet long, I once saw while waiting for Mimi to come home on a hot summer day: Queen Anne’s Lace, buttercups, poison ivy and jewel weed, clover, buttercups, chicory, daisy fleabane, a group of pinks, their tiny bright flowers just managing to be seen among the giants that surrounded them, and a large clump of wild lupine, their bright blue spires at the height of their glory. Lupine, perennial lupine, can’t be moved, or at least I had never been able to do it. This was important. When I’d tried to move her, she’d died. If that oval patch of land were destroyed, the blue lupine would be destroyed with it. Looking at the size of the roots one would assume she could survive all sort of change, but the size of those roots was deceptive, they made her seem less fragile than she was.

  Of course Mimi, even the old Mimi, couldn’t have gone to the Planning Board and argued against the road on behalf of the wild blue lupine. In a world where natural priorities were ritually reversed she would have been made to seem quite mad by the first self-righteous matron who pointed out that her child had fallen off his bike at that curve—even if in point of fact he’d barely bruised himself in the fall, even if for all the talk over all the years about the dangers of the road nobody has ever been seriously injured on it, people have simply traveled a little slower and arrived home a minute later. Perhaps I would be a little less horrified than I am of children if so many terrible things weren’t done in their name.

  “Will you go to the next meeting?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Yes, Beth. I’ll go to the next meeting, and the one after that . . . but I can’t promise to keep going much longer . . . for one thing, if I get much fatter I won’t even be able to leave the house, I won’t have a thing to wear.”

  “Someone has to go,” I said, fighting panic. “They’ll just slip it through, otherwise. Will one of the others go?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mimi said. “Some of the others should be willing . . . the
Chernins would lose much more land than we would, but I can’t tell . . . I’ll talk to them . . . sometimes in the last fight I felt they wouldn’t go on if it weren’t for us.”

  Us. Who constituted us? Mimi. Me. Barney. Barney wouldn’t go. Aside from the fact that like me he lacked Mimi’s ultimate faith in human beings, he really didn’t care too much. In a sense he didn’t care about anything. Not in the sense that he had no preferences, but rather that there was no event or circumstance so lacking in interest or irony that he couldn’t enjoy its outcome on some level, however unfavorable to us. Irony was mother’s milk to him. I broached the road to him when he came home from school that day. He laughed. I said I didn’t think it was funny.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” he said. “Any more than you’d ever really expect me to grapple with the town jokers over the road.”

  “If you cared about me you would,” I said.

  “Not true at all,” he said. “Doesn’t follow. Any more than it follows that you’ll go because you care.”

  I was silent.

  “Anyway,” he said, “this whole ‘You don’t care about me’ routine is very tricky. People never say it when they’re trying to give you something and you Won’t take it. I’ve never come up to my room and found you waiting in bed and turned away and had you tell me, ‘Barney, if you cared about me you’d accept my love.’ ”

  “That’s silly.” Although I’d thought about it, Barney, I mean, you must have known it had occurred to me. I had dreams. I had dreams that made me terrified that Mimi would die the next day because I could never be unconvinced of the connection between my dreams and Mimi’s death.

  Barney shrugged.

  I couldn’t even imagine what would have happened if you’d tried to make love to me, Barney. For years you’d said little things like that but usually Mimi was nearby and how did I know what would happen if that weren’t the ease? It was easier to picture you making love to me than to picture you—or anyone—making love to Mimi.

  Max came by that night and invited me again to see the house the next day, saying that most of the work was done now, but I was far too agitated to go any place.

  “What is it?” he asked me. “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s the road,” Mimi said. “She’s upset because they’re talking about widening the road again.

  “Sugar Hill,” Max said. “I just saw something about it in the paper.”

  “Mimi’s the only one that stopped them from doing it before,” I said. “Mimi and a few of the others but mostly Mimi, and now she doesn’t want to fight them any more.”

  “Say, Max,” Barney said, and I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t trying to help anybody, only to make mischief, “That’ll affect your land, too, won’t it.”

  Max nodded. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking about it. It’ll affect me worse,’ in a way, because the house is set much closer to the road, you know, the acreage is in the back, the house is only thirty, forty feet from the road.” He shook his head.

  “I should think,” Barney said gravely, “that it would definitely be in your best interest to pick up the gauntlet, with the Board, I mean, fighting the road.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Max said, unaware of or at least indifferent to Barney’s ironic prodding. “I think I’ll go to the meeting, anyhow . . . see what’s happening. When is it anyway?”

  Mimi sighed loudly. “Honestly, Beth,” she said. “I promised I’d go to the next one. I can’t see what all the fuss is about.” As though the whole conversation had been staged for her benefit.

  “When is it?” Max asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, you don’t have to go. I’ll take care of it.”

  “If you tell me when it is,” Max said calmly, “I’ll be happy to pick you up.”

  Mimi looked at him with a combination of confusion and hostility. “But you really don’t have to bother,” she said. “If I go, and the Chernins and one or two of the others go, the usual ones, I mean, you don’t have to bother.”

  He shrugged. “I’d like to go, anyway. I can find out when it is.”

  He wouldn’t fight her nor would he let her tell him what to do. I think I had my first fond feelings for him that night.

  • • •

  But when the meeting came, they went separately, and the road wasn’t brought up.

  • • •

  Josh didn’t come for Thanksgiving and I knew it was a bad sign although Mimi swore it had nothing to do with the land but only with the fact that he was on location in Spain and would have had to make a special trip back. He had let Lily come with him. They had left Yiytzo together in a perfectly casual way as though it were the usual thing for them to do and apparently she’d succeeded in hanging on to him all those two or three months because he wrote that she was with him in Spain. I felt it had to do with my own sudden estrangement from him—something about a common enemy. His letter said that they would be home for Christmas, and I wrote this to Vincent right away.

  Vincent came, not with the woman he was living with but with her son. Vincent was in an enormously expansive mood, more so than I’d ever seen him. The two of them had driven across the country together, stopping whenever they felt like it, and Vincent seemed more excited at having given the boy this adventure than the boy was at having had it. Although it was difficult to tell. He was very quiet and his manners were almost excessively good. This is carping, especially from me. Raucous children are very upsetting to me. But this boy . . . it was as though he feared that if he once forgot to say thank you he would be put out of the house. When he spoke at all his words were soft-flat notes that struck the ear instead of falling into it. Vincent was dirty and rumpled when they arrived but Steven was immaculate, face clean and shiny, his light brown hair cut too close to his head to get sloppy. His face long and pale and dreadfully serious (a description which I now realize has often been given of me). Mimi and I both greeted them at the door and Mimi kissed Steven and said it was good to have him and Vincent said, “Go easy, now, huh?” and Mimi retreated to the kitchen and Steven looked puzzled.

  At lunch Vincent delivered an exuberant travelogue on their cross-country trip, complete with stories such as the one about a desk clerk in Fort Wayne who didn’t want to give them a room, finally admitting to the suspicion that the bearded Vincent was illegally taking a minor across state lines. Vincent, who apparently has great patience with this particular form of stupidity, didn’t stamp out and find another motel but instead got his suitcase, in which he had a paperback copy of his latest book, Death of Roget, with a snapshot of himself on the back, and when the man apologized profusely for his suspicions, autographed the copy and gave it to him. At three in the morning when Vincent had just gone to sleep there was a loud knock at the door. Groggily Vincent opened it and had the book thrown in his face.

  “Next time,” Vincent said, “he’ll know better than to give a room to any writer, minor or not.”

  “The only thing that’s surprising,” Barney said, “is that he understood enough of it to know it was dirty.”

  “In Indiana,” Vincent said, “books are dirty unless proven innocent.”

  Mimi got up to clear the table and Steven got up to help her.

  “Hey, Steve-O,” Vincent said, “you don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to,” Steven replied, and Vincent shrugged but I could see that he was annoyed.

  “Yes,” Barney said to Vincent, “but what did he find in it? Part of the joke was not using any dirty words, yes? So what did he find?”

  “He found my intentions, pal. Don’t ask me how but they always do. Idiots always know when you’re laughing at them. They may not know another fucking thing but they know that. Like the Nazis with their facial insubordination bit. Did you ever read anything about that? Some of their prisoners could be polite and completely unprovocative and still bug the hell out of the examiners. There was something in these guys that nothi
ng could touch and it drove the Naxis crazy, there was some kind of reserve there, and when the examiners got down to that place and couldn’t get any further, the image bounced back and they saw themselves instead and couldn’t take it. The mistake people like you make . . . you Eastern intellectuals”—flashing a grin at Barney—“you assume these people don’t read because they don’t know that books would open a whole new world to them. But it’s not new worlds that books open up, it’s the old one, the inside of their own heads. And they want to see the inside of their own heads about as much as they want to see a cross section of their mother-in-law’s tongue. If they read about people who’re like themselves they’re repelled and if they read about people who’re better they’re upset by the implicit contrast. Which leaves them with the people—or non-people, preferably—who’re much worse than they are, specifically along criminal and sexual lines. The only decent books that sell are the ones that happen to have enough sex and violence to distract the general reader from the message. They give his mind something to light on before the wheels start turning too fast and he gets an unwelcome idea in his head.”

  Vincent always sounded entirely different when he talked about Indiana and the people there, in general, than he sounded when he talked about his father in particular, although he’d never said anything to suggest that his father was a misfit out there. On the contrary, he’d said more than once that his father’s claim on his affections stemmed largely from his ordinariness, from his being what he was meant to be, a real person, born and raised in a real place, who’d taken a lot of shit from life and managed to keep being the same person, unlike—guess who—so unlike Josh, whom Vincent was fond of calling a geographical-historical freak and/or a hybrid gone to seed.

  • • •

  No one could fine Steven after the meal and he turned out to be in the kitchen with Mimi, drying dishes as she washed. Vincent said he hadn’t brought Steven a thousand miles across the country to do dishes but again it turned out that this was what Steven had wanted to do, not what Mimi had asked of him. He clung to her for the rest of the day, at first to Vincent’s chagrin. But then finally, grudgingly, Vincent became pleased—and even grateful to her that Steven was having a good time. After the dishes the three of them walked down to the farm together to get eggs for breakfast. Mimi asked if I wanted to go but of course I didn’t. Something about the boy made me uncomfortable. I didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t dislike him, I just . . . there was something at once sad and irritating about the way he clung to Mimi. He asked for nothing and yet I felt by his very presence that he was a beggar. I kept remembering the second time I was in the hospital, when I was thirteen. While I was out on the grounds one day a ragged old man came to the fence and stuck his hand through, begging for money. I would have readily given him money if I’d had it but of course I didn’t. When I told him this, though, he ignored me and went on begging. I tried to move away but his whining demanding voice followed me everywhere I went and finally I began screaming at him, asking him what kind of a stupid old man he was not to be able to see that I had no money. Then he said that maybe I could give him food and I said I didn’t have food, either, but by this time one of the attendants had come over and she gave him some saltines she had in her pocket and took me inside.