“I make believe everything is still ours,” I said, “except that I can’t take walks outside without remembering and then it’s spoiled.” How long could I make believe when the bulldozers came in? “Sometimes I think I should force myself to do it even if I don’t want to.”
“I wouldn’t,” Barney said. “You can’t be that sure of the results. Maybe you’ll have a breakdown.”
I was surprised and hurt. “You’re threatening me. Is it because you don’t want me to go?”
“What difference does it make? It’s a possibility, you must’ve thought of it.”
“I don’t think I thought of it the way you did. Not as something that would happen to me. I thought of it as one of the ways of escaping if I wanted to. Going down into myself. That was silly, I suppose, it never used to happen because I willed it to. The times when it’s occurred to me that it might be convenient, say when Lily’s around, it’s never happened, at least while she’s there, but anyway . . . it was stupid to think of it that way. It’s more frightening to me, really, than death is.”
“How about being married?” he asked. “Where does that fit on the fright scale?”
“Well,” I said, “there are frightening possibilities.” Thinking as I went along. “Max could turn out to be not the way he seems to be. Unwilling to let me be the way I am, which is all I really would ask. The idea of marriage . . . why should it frighten me? I’m not sure I’ve ever been frightened of marriage, I just didn’t think of it in relation to me. Nobody ever asked me and I never in a million years would have gone out to look for a husband. But here’s Max. What does it mean to go and live with him? It means leaving this house and of course that’s what’s frightening to me. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it even if I decide to. Part of me can never be removed from here and I’m not sure I could tear the rest of me away from that part. But assuming for the moment that I can do it . . . that I can leave Yiytzo . . . go to Max’s . . . the really frightening things aren’t in Max’s house. They’re beyond it. There’s nothing inside to be scared of . . . I’ll take my own bed and dresser and clothes . . . but . . . my life there wouldn’t be so different . . . the things I do here I can do there.”
If I wanted to do them. That was the thing I was unsure of. Would the flowers at Max’s house respond to me as did the flowers at Yiytzo? More than that, would I want to tend the flowers at Max’s house? A very long time passed. Barney stared at me and stared at me and stared at me. Making me conscious of how long I’d been talking. How did this baby of Mimi’s turn me into a talker? I suppose by forcing me to seek understanding from other people. Barney shook his head as though to wake himself up.
“Does Max share your bucolic asexual vision of this marriage?” he asked.
I laughed. “Why do you say asexual? Just because I don’t talk about sex with you?”
“This taking-your-own-bed bit. You sound as if you’re carrying a portable shrine to your virginity.”
“It’s a huge bed, Barney, I’ve slept in it since I was seven years old and they made me give up my crib. It’s very big and I’ve never slept anywhere else since then.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why do you pick that to talk about, out of everything I said?”
“Because you didn’t say anything else I can quarrel with.”
“And you want to quarrel.”
He nodded.
“Because you’re angry with me.”
He nodded again.
It was too simple to be interesting. I almost wanted to quarrel just to please him but I didn’t have the interest. He seemed very distant from me at that moment. As though I’d gone already. As a matter of fact, it was frightening, how distant he seemed. Frightening because it suggested that I had no control over whether I would go. As though some sort of tearing or falling had begun already. I was someplace else. There wasn’t even room for him where I was.
“I think I’d better go up,” I said. I was frightened. My heart was beating very rapidly.
“Why bother? It’s almost time to get up.”
Hot and cold. Panic.
“I have to.”
“What do you mean, you have to?” Irritably.
“I want to,” I said, and dashed up to my room before he or anything else could stop me.
A letter from Vincent.
Dear Beth: Mimi told me you’re thinking of marrying Max. I’d like to come and talk to you about this but I can’t right now because Myrna was ill with the flu and Steven caught it and developed pneumonia. He’s getting better but meanwhile it’s difficult for me to get away.
I wish you’d wait a while. I’m not saying I have any right to ask you to wait but I’m asking anyway. I’m not sure why. For Mimi’s sake if not for your own. She seems to feel that you’re going for the wrong reasons and that this is almost a guarantee you’ll be disappointed. She may be right. I have nothing against Max, he’s a good kid although I’m not sure he has any better an idea than you do of what marriage involves. Anyway, as I say, I’d like very much for you to wait until I can talk to you before you do anything. What’s more important, Mimi cares terribly that you should wait, and I think you owe her that much.
Love and see you soon,
Vincent
So much for Vincent’s homework assignment from Mimi. I spent three days framing answers in my mind but never sent any of them.
Dear Vincent: You do see you have no right to stop me. How can you fail to see that she has no more right than you? Why should you think that because for thirty years she Mimi’d me and I Beth’d her she has a right now to stop me from doing what inner need compels me to do?
In my unmailed answers I always sounded more certain than I was that I was going to do it.
• • •
Max would call and Mimi would race me for the phone. If I picked it up downstairs I could hear a click on the upstairs phone. If he came by to take a walk with me she would be hovering tight-lipped near the front door when we got back.
“Max,” she’d said to him the first time, “there are some things we think you should know about Beth.”
“Fine,” he said. “She can tell me while we’re walking.”
“Have you heard from Vincent?” Mimi asked me.
I nodded.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“He said what you asked him to say,” I told her.
• • •
“Beth,” she said a few days later, “Could you just do one thing for me? Could you call Dr. Angstrom?”
“If it’s for you,” I said, “why don’t you call?”
“That’s not very funny.”
We had entered a phase where Mimi was always telling me of the unfunniness of things I didn’t think were funny in the first place.
“Anyway,” I said, “you probably called him already. Didn’t you?”
She nodded unwillingly.
“And what did he say?”
“He said you should call him.”
“I think maybe he said that if I wanted to talk to him then I should call him.”
“I don’t really like glass walls,” I said to Max. “They scare me, walls that aren’t walls.”
“What do you think,” he asked after a few minutes, “of glass walls that have sliding doors, or some kind of louvred wooden door-s in front of them that you can keep closed if you want to?”
“I think,” I said, “that they’re much better than plain glass walls.”
• • •
“It was Max’s grandmother’s,” I said to Mimi when I found her in my room examining the beaded bag Max had given me. “She only passed it on to his mother.”
“She was a horrible woman, his mother,” Mimi said, as vehemently as though she’d had some personal experience with that horribleness. “Vincent said she was the worst battleaxe he’s ever known, he’ll never forget her.”
I smiled.
“Don’t you think he must have been scarred, having a mother
like that?”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Are you being this way on purpose?” Mimi fretted. “I mean, I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
“Mimi,” I said, “I’m going to marry Max or I’m not going to. What does conversation have to do with it?”
• • •
“Do you even think about things like birth control?” she asked Max suddenly, having finally forced herself to have him to dinner.
“Oh my God!” Barney moaned.
“What are you oh my godding about?” she asked him, furious. “Someone has to think about these things.”
“Why you?” Max asked impassively.
She looked at him, tears springing to her eyes. She would have squirmed in her chair had there been room left between the arms for her to squirm.
“Because,” she said, steadying her voice, “Beth doesn’t want to have children.”
“So?”
“May I suggest . . .” Barney drawled.
“No,” she said. “Who are you to suggest? You stay in there in your little study, I never see you, you only want your bottle for company, and then you come out and say oh my God and suggest.” She burst into tears. Barney was only bemused but Max was upset.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, I just . . .”
“I didn’t want to hurt yours, either,” she sobbed. “I’m only trying to help.”
“It is more blessed to be able to stand aside,” Barney intoned, “than it is to need to help.”
And with that Mimi let out a long wordless bloodcurdling scream that silenced us all.
• • •
Mimi ceased to move. She was always sitting in the rocker in the kitchen. When she had to get out of it, to go to the bathroom or whatever, it was as though she were a large inert object being moved across the floor by an invisible crane. She refused to go to any more Village Board meetings. Max went and told me they were still fighting, but neither of us mentioned it to her. She said if they were going to do it they were going to do it. It was like various things in life, if they were going to happen they were going to happen, you could only fight them for so long and then you got tired. I began having dreadful headaches. Long dull ones. As though my head were in a vise. Mimi turned the calendar to March.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Three weeks. I can’t believe it’s going to take so long and I can’t believe it’s so close. I can’t believe the whole thing.”
“What is there to believe?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not that I’m scared. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“Pain?”
“No, of course not,” she said too quickly. “How much pain can I feel? At the beginning it doesn’t hurt, there’re only just these mild contractions, and then you get to the hospital and they have all kinds of stuff to keep it from hurting. Not anesthesia, I mean, I don’t want to be put to sleep. I’m terrified of being put to sleep, I mean, not terrified but . . . I don’t see any need for it. I wish I’d gone through with the exercises. That would’ve made it even easier. But they were too hard, I mean, with all this weight on me . . . my weight . . . I should’ve kept my weight down. He kept threatening me, telling me how terrible it was, telling me my blood pressure would go up but it never did, and then telling me how bad my delivery would be if I got too fat, I mean I was already a little overweight, but really fat, you know, like I did. Last week I asked him if it was true, what he’d said about the delivery, and he said not necessarily, you couldn’t really be sure in advance. I couldn’t tell if it was the truth or he was just saying it because it was too late, anyway.”
“Doctors use whatever part of the truth, they feel like using,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s fair.” She looked down at the bright orange sack of a dress she wore every day now. “Where’s Max?” she asked, smoothing the orange cotton over her belly—a territory which now gave the appearance of beginning below her neck and ending at her legs. “I haven’t seen him for a few days.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Has he called you?”
“No. Why should he?”
“I don’t know;” she said. “Just to show he’s thinking about you, I suppose.”
“Maybe he isn’t.”
“But don’t you want him to?”
“Not really,” I said. “I mean certainly not all the time. If he was thinking about me at bad times maybe I’d get bad vibrations.”
She frowned. “I never used to realize what a tease you are.” She looked at the calendar. “There’s nothing on the whole calendar for March except my due date. I wonder what else will happen in March.”
“The crocuses will be up.”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. “If you get married . . when will you get married?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “When I feel like it, I guess.”
“Good Lord, Beth, you don’t just get married when you feel like it. I mean, you have to arrange things.”
“I imagine Max would arrange things.”
“You have to have a blood test,” she said. “He can’t do that for you.”
“I imagine it’ll all be taken care of in its time, Mimi,” I said.
She closed her eyes and rocked.
“I wish if she were going to do it she’d do it,” I heard her say to Barney one evening the next week.
Barney said nothing.
• • •
A few days later Vincent arrived driving a rented white Jaguar as though ironically aware of his new status as Mimi’s knight. I don’t know if he’d given her notice but no one had given me any. I went up to the attic to hide because I felt unprepared to see him and found that Mimi had hidden there quite a few things for the baby. A cradle, some blankets, packages of infant clothing. I picked up a yellow sweater and unfolded it but when I saw the size, the crazy ridiculous tiny helpless size, I began trembling and I was terribly cold and then before I knew what was happening I’d urinated on the cold attic floor.
Oh my God, oh my God. I was so upset by my accident that I couldn’t move, I just stood there clenching the sweater thinking, I can’t go down now, I can’t go down like this, now 1 can never go down. I sat down where I was, resting my head on the old sofa where Mimi had piled the clothing, wrapping the sweater around my hands for warmth. But I was still cold. I got up and went over to the closet wall where all the old clothes and the summer clothes hung and found an old coat of Mimi’s with a fox collar and wrapped myself in it. I sat down near the sofa again but the smell of the urine nauseated me. I took off the wet pants and crumpled them up and hid them in the farthest corner of the attic, but my dress had gotten a little wet and I could still smell the smell. I put the fox collar in front of my nose and settled down again.
They found me. Mimi couldn’t make it up to the attic any more, of course, but she sent up Vincent.
Vincent said, “Oh Christ, sure she’s here.”
I didn’t look at him.
“Come on down, Beth,” he said. “I came just to see you.”
I went without looking at him. Letting him lead me. Still wrapped in the coat, still holding the sweater, keeping it beneath the coat so he wouldn’t see it.
“I don’t want you to come into my room,” I said to him at the door.
“Okay,” he said. “Will you come down?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t feel like coming down.”
“Come on, Beth,” he said wearily. “I didn’t drive a thousand miles to get the runaround from you.”
“Talk to Mimi,” I said. “She’s the one you drove the thousand miles for.”
Being Vincent, he could not easily deny the truth. The best he could manage, and it took a while, was, “That’s not entirely true.”
“Yes it is. True enough. You’re not worried about me. You came because Mimi’s
worried about me. You’re much too involved with that woman and her boy to be worried about me.”
“All right,” he said after a moment. “It’s true.”
“What happened with them?” I asked. “How come you left them there? Because it was a business trip?”
“I’ll answer your questions if you’re interested in answers, but let’s sit down and talk. There’s no sense standing out here in the hallway.”
“Vincent?” Mimi called. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” Vincent called back. “We’re just talking.”
We went into my room and I locked the door behind us.
“The answer to your first question, what happened with them, is that nothing’s exactly happened but things are very difficult. Myrna seems to be testing me, seeing how far she can go before I walk out. Sometimes I’m sure she wants to drive me out.”
“I thought you were going to marry her,” I said.
“I asked her. She doesn’t want to.”
I was surprised in spite of my determination not to let him get me caught up in his affairs. He smiled grimly.
“Why not?”
“She says I only want to do it because of Steven.”
“Is it true?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. It’s hard to be sure, they’ve always been together in my mind. Sometimes I know, when she’s on one of her rampages, I know I’m only sticking around to protect him. Her temper is incredible. I don’t know if you could tell. She has such a temper she makes me feel nearly placid. But on the other hand there’s that very fact that makes it hard to tell. She does bring out these things in me that haven’t come out before. I get along better with myself than I did before I knew her. You’d be surprised to see me out there. Very domestic. I’ve been enjoying doing stuff around the house. I don’t do it to mollify her. And I work well there. Writing, reading, whatever. The interruptions only seem to make me more eager to get back to work. The difficulties I have with her, God knows they’re tremendous but for some reason they’re not the kind of difficulties that interfere with my work, that get way down inside me and eat away at me. Of course maybe they would if we got married. That’s something it’s impossible to tell in advance. Anyway, it looks as if we’re not getting married so it doesn’t matter.”
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 16