Silence. Shadows between us. We had been a family without births, marriages and deaths. Somewhere . . . in Montreal, in Vincennes, in Minnesota, we had cousins, sons and daughters of Lily’s three older brothers and Josh’s younger brother and sister none of whom Josh and Lily ever saw, and these aunts and uncles and cousins had deaths and children and sent us announcements and Mimi sent presents and told them that if they were ever in the East they really should come and see us and every once in a while one of them did come to see what exactly these strange almost-family people were like, and then they went home to their Elks Clubs and their supermarkets and their Sunday schools.
“So,” Vincent said. “That’s what’s been happening to me. Now you.”
“Nothing’s been happening, exactly,” I said.
“Don’t be evasive. This isn’t the time for it.”
“What is it time for?”
“Well . . . Mimi feels that what it’s not time for is for you to rush into a marriage that may not be good for you.”
“I’m hardly rushing, Vincent. I’ve known him since last summer and he asked me at Christmas and here it is March and I haven’t done it so it’s hardly rushing.”
“You know what I mean, Beth. Rushing to avoid the baby.”
“But if I’m going to avoid the baby I’ll have to rush, won’t I?”
“Why do you have to? That’s what I don’t see. It’s not as though anyone’s asking you to take care of it.”
In a house with a baby the baby took something from everyone, not just from the people who took care of it.
“I don’t see why I should have to explain it,” I said. “Talking about it won’t make me feel any more or less that way.”
“Because of Mimi,” he said after a while. “That’s why you should explain it. You’ve made her feel guilty about getting pregnant, for Christ’s sake, as if she perpetrated some kind of fucking injustice on you having a baby.”
I nodded. He stared at me with his mouth open, as though I’d said something he hadn’t known all along.
“You once told me,” he finally said, “that you owed her your whole existence.
“Yes,” I said. “And the quality of it. I mean, existence in itself has no particular value, not to me, anyway. It’s the fact of her having given me a certain kind of existence. Actually, when I say I owe Mimi my existence it’s only a kind of semantic trick, because if anything, having kept me alive by maintaining a certain set of circumstances, she owes it to me to maintain those same circumstances.”
“You are,” Vincent said slowly, “the most incredibly self-centered human being that I’ve ever . . .”
“Whatever I am,” I said, feeling quite threatened and upset, “I’ve always been this way. I was this way all through the time when you loved me and hated Mimi. It’s only your needs and your perspective that have changed. I was this way when we first met. I was this way in the days when you made love to me.”
He was startled again. His eyes narrowed. “In all these years you never mentioned it,” he said. “Anyway, we didn’t exactly make love, not technically.”
“Technically!” I said scornfully.
“I thought you’d forgotten.”
“You wanted to think so,” I said. “I don’t forget anything.”
“Why didn’t you ever mention it before?”
“To whom? Mimi? Barney? The psychiatrists?”
“To me. You never . . . it was as though the whole thing, all those afternoons, as if they’d been some kind of dream.”
“I suppose you felt guilty,” I said. “You were much older than I was, I was a child.”
“I felt guilty, all right,” he muttered.
“You shouldn’t have,” I said. “You didn’t hurt me. Nothing you did ever hurt me until you stopped caring for me.”
“Why do you say I stopped caring for you?”
“Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “This has been a crazy year for me.”
“You became a sort of parent,” I said. “It changed everything.”
“Do you think so?” he asked intently.
“It changed the way you look at me and Mimi,” I said. “Mimi’s changed some but that’s not it, that’s not why you see her differently. It wouldn’t make sense. Because she’s not as good as she used to be but you see her as much better. You used to think her goodness was all false and now you think it’s all true. You didn’t accept her the way she was and now you don’t accept me the way I am. Maybe it’s a natural thing, to think that if her giving is a virtue, then my accepting must be a vice.”
“I never knew you,” he said after a long time. “I never knew you at all.”
“You knew as much as you wanted to know,” I said.
“What I want to know,” he said absently, “is what the hell is making it all come out of you now? What’s turned you into a talker?”
“Everything, I guess. Talking is a kind of self-defense.”
He smiled. “You don’t have to defend yourself against me, kid.”
Mimi knocked at the door and Vincent opened it for her.
“What’s happening?” she asked. “What are you two talking about all this time?”
I didn’t answer.
“Beth is convincing me,” Vincent said, “that she can take care of herself better than anyone knows.”
“What do you mean?” Mimi asked, glancing at me uneasily.
“I mean,” Vincent said, “I think you just have to let her make up her mind and she’ll be all right.”
“You’re going to do it, then,” Mimi said to me.
I shrugged.
“When?”
“If and when,” I said calmly, “I am moved to do it.”
Silence.
• • •
A silence.
Stillness.
Stillness hung over everything.
The house was swollen with stillness and silence.
We talked to each other beneath water which deadened the sound waves.
Even my dreams were locked in stillness so that I couldn’t move when I slept. I dreamed I was strapped to the bed having shock treatment. I dreamed I’d gone into a secret tunnel under the house and grown so much that I couldn’t get out of it. I dreamed I was in a coffin and they were hammering down the lid because I was so still that they couldn’t see I was alive. I dreamed I was swathed in a thick plastic film that permitted neither breath nor movement. The dreams left me too exhausted to talk or move and I had to force myself to get out of bed for at least a while each day. Mimi told me the crocuses were all up but I was locked in the stillness of the house and never went out to see them.
Max came.
“I thought you should see her when she’s like this,” Mimi said to him, I think.
He nodded gravely.
“Are you all right?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “except that I’m all locked in so I can’t do anything.”
“Max,” Mimi said, “make her let me call the doctor.”
“Mimi thinks doctors are magic,” I said. “They can’t do anything. I don’t need a doctor, I need a locksmith.”
Max smiled.
“Is there something to be lost by waiting?” he asked Mimi.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There are drugs now that they didn’t have in the old days when Beth used to . . .”
“I don’t want any doctors,” I said, “and I don’t want any drugs.”
Barney slept in the Morris chair. He was drunk most of the time now. Waiting. Swollen. Mimi the Queen of Swollen. Mrs. Cushman brought in tea. Only Mrs. Cushman didn’t wait and swell. Mrs. Cushman had grown thin and nervous. I had a vision of large globules of fat disengaging themselves from Mrs. Cushman and attaching themselves to Mimi.
“I had an offer for the house,” Max told me. “I turned it down.”
Total irrelevance.
“I hope it won’t turn out to be a mistake,” Mimi said.
> “Mmm,” Max said.
“Were they willing to pay what you were asking?”
“Pretty nearly. It doesn’t matter.”
They drank tea. Mimi was upset because I didn’t want any. They talked.
“Did you know there were some men working at the farm?” Max asked her. “Surveying?”
“No,” she said nervously. “I really hadn’t noticed.”
Gurgle gurgle. Mimi was the world’s worst liar.
Max came every day, or so it seemed.
“Max,” Mimi said, twisting a handkerchief, “I want to ask you a favor. If I should happen to . . . you know, if I should go into labor at a time when Barney can’t take me to the hospital, could I—”
“Sure,” Max said. “Any time. I’d be happy to take you.”
“Really?” Mimi asked. She seemed to find it hard to believe. “I mean, there are other people I could ask, and I know we hardly . . . but you’re here so much, anyway, if I could . . .”
“No sweat,” Max said. “If I’m not here just call me. Whenever it is.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. “That’ll be great. Just knowing I can count on someone.”
In the corner Barney began singing, “Everybody needs somebody,” and was ignored.
“Max,” Mimi said hesitantly, “I want you to know . . . I realize I haven’t been exactly hospitable to you. I mean, I haven’t encouraged you, you know . . . but I hope you realize it has nothing to do with you, it’s not that I have anything against you, it’s only that I’m so accustomed to taking care of Beth . . . worrying about what’s good for her, and so on.”
“Sure,” Max said. “I understand.”
“Really?” Mimi said. “Because I mean I’d hate to think . . .”
“No kidding,” Max said. “Please forget it.”
“All right,” Mimi said. “Then I will.”
Silence.
Suffocation.
Sleep.
• • •
I fell out of the bed.
“My God, Beth,” Mimi said, “I only tapped you, I didn’t push you, I wasn’t even sure you were asleep.”
She was clutching her stomach, grimacing.
“I wanted to tell you I’m going to the hospital. I didn’t want you to come out of bed and find me not here and be upset. Barney’s taking me. Mrs. Cushman’s in the living room. Okay?”
I didn’t answer. Too angry because I was sure I’d been pushed.
“I’ll talk to you later, Beth,” Mimi said. “I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
I was so angry that at first I was paralyzed by my anger and couldn’t even get up off the floor. Then I decided to go. I put out my hands to steady myself against each wall but they weren’t as close as they seemed. I felt dizzy and tried to sit down on the bed but it was rocky so I got up again. Rockily made my way to the door. Couldn’t get it open. Finally forced it open, stuck out my head, changed my mind, tried to get back into my room but somehow my body was leaning against the door in such a way that I couldn’t get my head back in to close it. The door. The damn door. I was afraid to go out and I couldn’t go back in. I could barely breathe. Finally I fell to the hallway floor, or was it the outside. It was cold and there were lights, maybe it was the hallway. No, it was cold. And wet. It was the outside. I fell down the steps and onto the ground. Lights were on.
“Beth?” Mrs. Cushman called. “Beth? Is that you? I’m putting up some tea.”
I felt choked with mucus. I coughed but I couldn’t get it up. I cried but no one heard me. I lay there. Mrs. Cushman closed the front door without seeing me. I ran up the path through the interior garden, tripping several times but not falling. The one time I did fall the ground seemed to spring up at me as I went down so that only my palms touched it and then I bounced up as though it were a mattress spring. The outside gardens. Brambles catching my nightgown. The interminable driveway. Sugar Hill Road. I stopped for a moment, appalled by the dark winding length of it, thinking for a flash of a second that maybe the people were right who wanted to straighten it out and put lights along the side but I knew even then that I was being ridiculous, it was only that I was there at the wrong time in the wrong clothes—almost no clothes, and no shoes, I was very cold although the cold wasn’t actually hurting me yet. Still it was hard moving up the road and I began resenting the fact that I seemed to have no choice in the matter, that is, I was doing the work of the movement but I couldn’t stop if I wanted to, I was being propelled and yet the propulsion wasn’t making the trip any easier for me. The surroundings became the enemy. The road pushed me on. Pushed me and tricked me with its miserable curves. If only, I kept thinking, if only Max would come and get me out of here, if only . . . but I had to keep on and on and on and on and I was so in agony as not even to notice the different details of my feelings until I got to Max’s house and knocked- frantically on the door until he opened it and when he did I fell to the ground, at once blinded by the entrance light, shivering uncontrollably with the cold I hadn’t really felt until I left it, crying with the pain of my bare, cold, bleeding feet.
He picked me up. He was absolutely silent; not even the smallest exclamation to set me off from him. He just picked me up and at the first touch of his hands I began to cry. He brought me up to his room and put me in his bed and covered me, then he got more blankets from someplace and piled those on me, too. The telephone rang and he picked it up and I heard him say that I was there and then there was a long pause and then he said, “Suppose we wait a while. I don’t know if there’s anything that needs to be done,” and then there was another pause and he hung up. My eyes were blurred so that he was a shadow.
“Do you mind if I go downstairs?” he asked. “I want to make you something hot to drink.”
I smiled and his shadow moved away from me.
I got warm. My feet hurt more from the cuts as they got warmer. My hands felt stiff and dry. I wrapped them around myself so they wouldn’t rub too much against the sheets. The bottom of my nightgown got wrapped around my ankles but I didn’t really mind. I slept. The phone awakened me. I could see a little more clearly. I saw Max get up from the chair where he was sitting and pick up the phone. Monosyllables. Assurances that at the moment he couldn’t see any reason to call a doctor. Tomorrow we would be in touch. He hung up again.
“Do you have my drink?” I asked.
He smiled. “It’s cold already. That was a few hours ago.”
“I don’t mind.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, took the cup of tea and milk, held it for me to drink.
“Was that Mimi?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Barney.”
“Barney?” I was puzzled because I didn’t remember yet. “What does Barney want?”
“To tell us Mimi had her baby. A girl.”
Erica for a girl. Mimi wasn’t home at all, she was at the hospital. With Erica.
“I don’t really care for that name,” I said.
“What name?” he asked.
“Erica,” I told him. “Do you like it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t really care about it one way or the other.”
“Me neither,” I lied. “I don’t really care about it either.”
And so, faced with a crucial decision, I let myself be pushed into the apparently sane choice. But that choice is not binding on all levels of me at all times. What is a marriage, anyway? Only a transplant. Nobody expects a plant to flourish immediately after being moved, it will need time and care to become accustomed to its new situation. Nor will the form and color God has given it be altered by its new position. If I move some blue phlox next to a brilliant pink azalea I do so only because they will look glorious together for a few brief weeks in the spring, and not because I think either plant will thus acquire some spectacular characteristic that it never possessed.
I am still Elizabeth. I have been married to Max for a year. I haven’t been able to go back to Yiytzo but I haven’t been taken to a hospital,
either. I have given ground but I am still Elizabeth. That is a triumph of sorts.
Also by Judith Rossner
Any Minute I Can Split
Attachments
August
Emmeline
His Little Women
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Olivia
Perfidia
To the Precipice
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by Judith Rossner
Previously published in 1969 by The Dial Press.
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First Simon & Schuster ebook edition July 2014
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Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 17