“What else can you do?” He leaned on the table, quite deliberately resting one elbow in the center of the spilled tea, blocking Mimi’s attempts to mop it up. “I mean,” he said conspiratorially, “I’d like to know because we’re in this thing together, kid.”
“Don’t you ever let up on me, Barney?” Mimi cried. “You used to tease me but then it was just sometimes and I didn’t mind but now you never stop and it’s so vicious.”
“It’s compulshive,” Barney said. “Like having a baby when you’re pregnant. Having jokes because you’re malignant.”
Her tears renewed themselves.
“I can get married,” I said, as much because her crying frightened me as because I felt like talking about it.
“What are you talking about?” she screamed through her tears, startling and upsetting me.
Barney just looked at me thoughtfully.
“I’m just talking about things I can do,” I told her.
“Why?” she asked, still screaming although not as loudly. “Why do you have to do anything?’
“I mean if I don’t want to stay here,” I said. Surprised that after my brief moment of upset I was becoming more and more calm. “You know I don’t like babies.”
“Oh, my God!” she wailed. “Are we going to go through that again?”
“Not again,” Barney said. “Still.”
“Nobody says you have to like the baby,” she said. “You can ignore it. You can do anything you want. Pretend it’s not here. I mean you don’t have to do anything. All this talk doesn’t make sense, you don’t just get married, just like that.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well because you know perfectly well you don’t just get married, Beth, it’s not this abstract thing, there has to be someone who asks you, and you have to be someone who . . .”
Were you ever that stupid, Mimi, except in a dream?
“Max asked me,” I said.
She looked at me blankly. As I had looked at Max. Tears disappeared. Hours passed. Six imaginary boxes of Mallomars disappeared into Mimi. Did any of it happen, Mimi? Did you really, after all those hours passed by, say to me, “Max? But Max isn’t really a person, he’s just someone who drops by.”
And did Barney and I stare at you, astounded, after all those years you astonished us both, and then did we both burst into laughter, and then did you blush deeply, realizing or at least partly realizing the absurdity of what you’d said, and did you then, your voice trembling, say . . .
“I know why you’re laughing, Beth, but you know what I meant.”
Thus in some way signifying the end of an era. You had never before seen the difference between your intentions and your effect. All sorts of possibilities opened up, most of them only to be closed again during the next few minutes.
I nodded.
“What did she mean?” Barney asked.
“She meant she didn’t know I cared about anyone outside.”
“Do you?”
“I think so. I think I’d better.”
Barney laughed but Mimi said, “My God, Beth, do you know what that sounds like? It sounds so cold and calculating, as if you don’t even care if you love him.”
“It’s not that I don’t care,” I said. “It just isn’t the only thing to think about.”
“Well it ought to be,” she said indignantly. “There’s nothing else that really matters but loving somebody.”
“That’s not what you told Vincent,” I said, “when he told you he might marry Myrna.”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
“Because she had no stake in it,” Barney suggested.
“I hate you,” she shouted at him. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
“Very good,” he said, pouring another drink. “Nurse it along.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand either of you. I can understand how you feel about the baby. No, that’s not true, I can’t . . . I can partly understand how you feel, about things changing, but you’re making me feel like a leper colony. People have babies all the time, it’s part of life, why is everybody running away from me?”
“I’m not running away from you, Mimi,” I said.
“From the baby, it’s the same thing. Almost the same thing. It’s not right for you to run away like this, Beth.” Giving the marriage fantasy a certain currency. “I just feel as if it’s not right. Not for me but for you, for your sake. You ought to at least talk to the doctor before you do something like this, you’re not really going to do it, are you, Beth? Did he really ask?”
I nodded.
“Will you talk to Dr. Angstorm?”
“I’m nearly thirty years old, Mimi,” I said.
“So what?” she asked. “What does your age have to do with it? What if you get married and have a baby yourself?”
“Oh, but I won’t,” I said quickly, feeling a surge of panic in spite of myself. “I’ll never have a baby.”
“But how can you get married not meaning to have a baby?”
“Plenty of people don’t have babies.”
“But they don’t get married not meaning to have them, it just happens that way. Barney and I never meant not to have a baby . . .”
“Speak for yourshelf,” Barney said.
“What about him?’ Mimi asked.
“Max?”
She refused to say his name. “What about him? Does he know you don’t want to have babies?”
“I’m sure he does. He wouldn’t have asked me to marry him if I wanted to have babies because then I would have been a different person.”
“I can’t cope with your logic, Beth,” she said. “I can’t believe all this is really happening.”
Silence.
“I think,” she said, “I think you should tell him and see what he says.”
“All right.” I smiled to reassure her. “If you want me to. I’ll ask him if he knew when he asked me to marry him that I didn’t like babies and if he wants to reconsider.” Thinking how funny it was that she was acting as if I were going to do it. I’d never said I would get married nor did I intend to get married.
Pause. Everything was still bothering her but one of the apparent reasons had been removed.
“When did he ask you to marry him?”
“Christmas.”
“You see, Mimi?” Barney said. “You were right. You shouldn’t have let them out of the house.”
“You haven’t known him very long,” Mimi said to me.
“Since last summer.”
“But you hardly . . . do you know him, Beth? I mean, is there something to know? He seems like such a boy, not at all interesting, do you know? One dimensional, sort of. He’s very pretty, of course.”
“It’s not like you to be so critical,” I pointed out.
“I don’t mean to be critical,” Mimi said to me. “I just—something about him bothers me, I don’t know what it is, but ever since he started visiting . . .”
“Maybe that’s it,” Barney said.
“Maybe what’s what?” Mimi asked.
“Maybe it’s that he started visiting.”
“You’re not being funny,” she said without looking at him.
“I don’t think he means to be,” I said.
She looked at me suspiciously. “The two of you,” she said. “The two of you are against me.”
“That’s not true.” That was true.
“I feel as if it is. I’m only trying to understand. . . . I mean, how did he ask you to marry him? What did he say?”
I chose to receive the question seriously. “He said that he didn’t really want to sell the house, he’d rather live there with me.”
“That’s not the same as getting married.”
“Oh, Mimi, he meant getting married. He said getting married. Please.”
“Anyway, that’s a very strange way to ask somebody to get married, as though the house were the whole thing.”
“But it’
s a part of it, obviously. If I have to leave this house then I have to go to another one.”
“You keep saying you have to leave this house, you keep acting as if you’re being forced out of it.”
“But I feel that way, Mimi. However well you mean toward me.” This was the thing she wouldn’t face. She was still always trying to reserve the right to determine the results of her actions. Does the first frost ever beg not to be blamed for killing the flowers?
“Feeling it isn’t the same as if it were true.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” But of course there was no answer. “Oh . . .” She waddled around the kitchen, looking a little ridiculous, her mind searching for something she hadn’t used yet. Moments like that Were useful to me, Mimi, serving as they did to make me see that it was only as a symbol that you couldn’t be replaced. Suddenly she realized it’d been there all along, the thing she wanted, and she whirled on me.
“Beth, how much does he know about you?”
“As much as he needs to know, I imagine.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean if he only knows a part of me then that’s the part he’ll deal with.”
Failure to be willing to comprehend. Distractedness. Then, quietly, “Beth, I want to know if you’ve told him your history.”
“He knows all about us,” I pointed out. “Apparently everyone in town knows about us.”
“Have you told him about being in and out of the hospital?”
“She means did you show him your aberrations?” Barney put in.
“I don’t remember if it ever came up.”
“I don’t see how you could not remember something like that.”
“It doesn’t seem very important to me. Certainly in the terms that you’re talking about it. The last time was fourteen years ago, what does it have to do with knowing me?”
“I think he should know what he might have to cope with.”
“Why?” I asked. “You didn’t cope with it. Sending someone to a hospital isn’t a way of coping with their madness, it’s a way of not coping with it.” Which was surely true although I’d never thought of it that way before. “That’s why I don’t see why you think I have to tell him. It wouldn’t tell him anything about me that he probably doesn’t know already, it only tells him how you dealt with me when I was a certain way.”
She stared at me wildly. “You’re turning everything against me. You’re trying to make me feel guilty. You never told me before that you held it against me, sending you to the hospital.”.
“I didn’t. I never even thought about it before. I’m only saying it was what you did so it tells Max about you, not about me.”
“Mimi was sixteen years old the first time, Beth,” Barney said. “The doctor said you should go and Josh had to consent, she had nothing to do with it.” Suddenly he sounded completely sober.
“She apologized to me,” I said. “Why did she apologize?”
“It had nothing to do with your going,” she said heatedly. “My God, you remember these things for years and then you turn them against me! It had nothing to do with your going.”
“What did it have to do with?” Barney asked.
“You just sit there and butt in when you feel like it,” she said to him bitterly. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it, I only wanted to know if this boy you’re talking about marrying . . . this little thing you might do to get away from here . . . if he can take care of you.”
“If he can’t,” I said, “I suppose he can send me back here or to the hospital.”
“You never used to be spiteful, Beth. Even when you . . . you weren’t always easy to take care of, but you were never spiteful.”
This was true. Perhaps, like Josh, I had been restrained by my idea of her idea of me. No, it was more than that. I had lacked the impulse to voice my meaner thoughts.
“Why did you send me to the hospital?”
“You wouldn’t get out of bed, Beth!” she said, her voice wavering. “How old were you, eleven, twelve? You wouldn’t eat and you wouldn’t talk and you wouldn’t even get out of bed to go to the bathroom, you just lay there and looked at me and even then I talked Mrs. Cushman out of calling the doctor for a day because I kept thinking you’d come back to yourself.”
“Then why did you apologize?”
“Because I thought maybe I caused your breakdown, that’s why!” she shouted at me. “Does that satisfy you? It was a crazy idea of mine, it had nothing to do with your going, it had to do with why you were sick in the first place. I thought you were getting even with me for something I’d done but it was a crazy idea because you didn’t even know about it, it was crazy to think for a minute that you knew about it, you didn’t know anything about it, you were just having a breakdown, that’s all!”
Barney whistled in the silence. “If you live long enough . . .” he murmured.
I was terribly curious. I could remember only up to the day before the day when I decided not to get out of bed. What could have importance of what I remembered? Darkness. Looking for Mimi. Where was she? She came home late. Went to high school. Had boyfriends. If I woke up and found her bed empty I couldn’t go back to sleep.
“What was it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It had absolutely nothing to do with you. Nothing.”
There was a gang of boys from the village who hung around a lot during that period. Rather rough boys. I stayed away when they were visiting because I was upset by the way they talked to her. Their manner was at once brutal and condescending and I was upset at her putting up with it. It made her seem someone less than she’d always seemed to be.
“Then why did you feel guilty?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I shouldn’t have. Sometimes when two things happen together you think they have something to do with each other even if there’s no reason to think so.”
One of the boys had been the one she was with during the riots the following year; another was the one who’d told her she was lucky he hadn’t seen her during them. I couldn’t remember seeing them around after the riots—of course Mimi was in college by the following year.
“Anyway,” Mimi said, “I don’t know how we got on to all this.”
“Max,” Barney said. “Remember Max?”
“Max,” Mimi repeated. As though she didn’t quite.
“You know Maxsh,” Barney said provocatively, “Beth’s boyfriend. The kid who’s been hanging around here.”
“He’s thirty-eight years old,” I said.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Mimi said.
“A darling boy,” Barney said. Genuinely drunk, he could turn on or off the drunken speech.
Pause.
“I’m the one who ought to leave here,” Mimi said. “You two get along fine, you should stay here, both of you. You’d probably be happier if I weren’t here anyway.”
“That isn’t so, Mimi,” I said. “Feeling that way about the baby isn’t the same as feeling that way about you.”
“I think it is,” she said. “I think if you loved me you’d love my baby.”
“Not really,” I said. “Only if I loved you without needing you.”
A long silence. Then Mimi, in the saddest softest voice I’d ever heard, said, “But what if it’s just the opposite?”
And when I could find nothing to say—because reassurances of love seem to me worse than meaningless—Mimi left the kitchen and went upstairs. Barney and I looked at each other guiltily. We looked away, doubly guilty at relieving our guilt by sharing it.
“I haven’t been in the hospital for nearly fourteen years,” I said.
He nodded.
The year after they were married. Once that year and once the year before and twice in the four years before that. Mimi always took me back as soon as I asked to go. She let them send me but then she took me back. Would she take me back now? Now that she would have a baby to take care of that
cried in the night and wanted things in its own time?
“Do you have an opinion about my marrying Max?”
“No opinions. Only reactions.”
“Do you like him?”
“What’s not to like? He’s a prince. A pauper’s Prince Myshkin.”
“About my marrying him . . . all these reactions you have . . . where does the burden lie?”
“On me,” he said. “The burden lies on me.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“What do you want from me?” he asked. “I don’t want you to get married. You know damn well I don’t want you to get married. Asking me if you should get married is like asking some broken-down old shoe husband if you should divorce him for someone better. I may know some good reasons for you to do it but that doesn’t say I have to like it. You and your sister . . . between you you make up something resembling a complete woman. The qualities you lack . . . the qualities that because you lack them it wouldn’t be possible for me to be married just to you, the resilience and so on . . . Mimi does have. Which is why I can be married only to her, if necessary. Even if some of the pleasantest parts of my married life will go if you leave. The qualities that make me love you are qualities I can live without. The softness. The reticence. The complex hypocrisy. The deep conviction that in the long run nothing of real importance goes on outside the boundaries of your own skin. The sensual reservoirs that attitude implies but what I’m too much a coward to try to find. Mimi has a deep conviction that nothing has any real pleasure or importance except insofar as other people react to it . . . a kind of “philosophical whoredom. Anyway, I can survive without your presence. I maybe couldn’t survive without my fantasies but that doesn’t matter because your presence isn’t required for my fantasies, either of the day or night variety. So . . . what have I told you that you didn’t know?”
Nothing. That my anxieties were for myself and therefore didn’t bother you. That my vices were reflections of yours and served to soothe you. That I did nothing that required one to be grateful to me. That you loved me and I loved you because you were Mimi’s husband. Could I love Max if he were my own?
“What I meant was whether you had any reaction in terms of how it would affect me.”
He laughed. “No, I don’t have any opinion on how it’ll affect you, Elizabeth. For all I know it won’t affect you at all. I’m not sure how much you’re affected by outside realities. I mean there are obvious things, Mimi’s having the baby, and the house business, but those hardly qualify as exterior.”
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 15