Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  Ben leans forward and yanks Rachel’s hair. Rachel bursts into tears. Ben stands up from the table. “I think I’ll go see what Rice is doing,” he says.

  “I’d rather you wouldn’t.” Kate’s voice has an urgency so rare and authentic that even the children hear it.

  “All right,” says Ben. “But she’d better leave me alone.”

  “You kids are just hungry,” Kate says.

  Next morning, Kate points the man from the telephone company toward the guest house, then imagines Pinky streaking past him through the open door and vanishing forever into the alleyways of Tucson. Pammy will, of course, blame Kate. Kate runs after him, crying “Wait!” and muttering unintelligible half-sentences about the cat.

  The telephone man is young, with longish hair, not the type to turn them in if Rice has left rolled joints and a mirror and razor blade in the middle of the living-room floor. He smiles as Kate says more than she needs to about her sister-in-law’s overbred Siamese. Kate opens the door and steps cautiously into the cool dark interior of the house.

  There is no problem locating Pinky, who is yowling at them from the round oak kitchen table where she sits, tall and cool as a fifties ceramic cat, perfectly still but for the yelling. “Shut up,” the telephone man says, then glances at Kate to make sure it’s all right. It’s a moment of peculiar intimacy; then the phone man starts checking the walls for the jack.

  “Funny house,” he says. The white stucco walls are indented, inside and out, with the impressions of a giant clam shell.

  “I love this house,” says Kate. “When the kids get bigger, we’re going to give them the other house and move out here.” Kate has said this before, but suddenly it strikes her as impossible. What would she do here when Nicky’s in L.A.?

  “Oh yeah?” says the phone man. “You could rent this.”

  “We’ve talked about it,” says Kate. In fact what they’ve said is: Let’s rent it and live on the rent. Forget work, forget California, live on rice and tortillas and beans.

  While the phone man works, Kate looks through a stack of paperbacks on the table. This seems to make Pinky yell louder, so Kate picks the cat up and puts her on the floor. The first book is Diet and Spiritual Health. The second is Food for This World and the Next. The third is Rational Fasting. The fourth, Cell Deprogramming. The fifth, Eat Less and Love More. They are all about food and the spirit, not macrobiotic exactly, but filled with strange diet suggestions.

  “Your brother-in-law go to school?” the phone man says.

  “No,” answers Kate, “he’s a carpenter.”

  In front of the books, and closer to the table edge, is a diary, navy velvet and gold, with gilt edges and a small gold lock—unlocked. Kate runs her hand over the plush cover, then quickly turns away. When the phone man goes out to the truck, Kate opens the diary to the first page of writing. She’d thought the book might be Pammy’s, but the narrow, tilted script is definitely Rice’s:

  The cat is getting used to our new dwelling place. Already it has found its spot, like Don Juan says. When it sits on the table, it looks very Egyptian, which is funny because the guy who read Pammy’s past lives said she was once an Egyptian queen. The cat and I take our little meals at the same time. I read aloud to it. I want the cat to be prepared.

  Kate wishes Nicky were here. How they would laugh at the thought of Rice reading spiritual bits to the cat. She’d settle for telling the phone man, but cannot admit she’s been reading a book plainly marked, in gold script, My Diary. When he walks in, she puts it down.

  That night, on the phone with Nicky, she says, “He wants the cat to be prepared for what?”

  “College,” Nicky says. “Kitty College.”

  “The priesthood,” Kate says, then shivers. It occurs to her that she hardly knows Rice. Nicky and he are twelve years apart; Nicky hardly knows him either. “Nicky, this could be bad. Anything could happen with Rice. He could be into some egg roll satanic magic—candles and Siamese cat sacrifice.”

  “Please,” says Nicky, “Relax. Hard as it is to believe, the guy and I share a DNA code.”

  Kate says, “Maybe Rice is a mutation.” But that isn’t what she wants to say. There’s something else she means to tell him, but she can’t remember it, though she waits so long for it to come back that Nicky says, “Hey, girl, this is long distance.”

  When Rice leaves for work the next morning, the sound of his truck wakes Kate. Day is just breaking, and in the little house, all the lights are still on. Well, it’s Rice’s electric bill. Isn’t it? Would he stiff his own brother? What if a wire overheats and starts a fire? Kate is incapable of leaving the lights on all day. She might as well turn them off now, in the few minutes before she has to wake the kids for school.

  Out in the yard, the smell of creosote is strong; the winter sun is pale, the paloverde and the century plant give off a silvery light.

  In the little house, Pinky is pacing the living room, making little whip turns at the corners; it crosses Kate’s mind that the lights may have been left on for Pinky. That Rice and Pammy would do such a thing fuels Kate with an outrage that rockets her across the room to Rice’s diary. Yesterday’s entry is still the only one. Kate is keenly—surprisingly—disappointed. She looks around the house. But there is nothing to see, Rice has nothing here except the books, some jeans and T-shirts, and a small microwave oven. Kate opens the refrigerator, where she finds a few dozen egg rolls, each wrapped in foil and stacked in rows that remind her of a brochure she saw once, an ad for cryogenics. Pinky is crying louder. Does the cat live on egg rolls too? Kate is relieved to see a tin of Kal Kan with its lid pushed halfway down.

  One day passes, then another. Kate’s only contact with Rice is the sound of his truck, twice a day. She feels restless, on edge. Friends call, but she doesn’t go out. When she thinks of Rice’s diary, she thinks: Some questions are better unanswered. She thinks: Curiosity killed the cat, and laughs a little hysterically and thinks: I’ve been alone too long. Somehow the weekend passes. Rice and the cat come back Monday night, and on Tuesday Kate waits till the kids have left for school, then walks across the backyard.

  Today she has no excuses. The lights aren’t on, Pinky is still in her spot on the table, but the diary is gone. Kate is aware of the cat watching her as she looks around the house. Finally she finds the diary in the bedroom, beside the mattress on the floor. Kate hasn’t been in this room for years. Neither she nor Nicky have reason to. One reason they bought the house was so Nicky could build his own sound studio here. But there is no work in Tucson, and the guest house has become a reproach, like something new and never worn, still hanging in the closet.

  There’s so little here—a mattress, a blanket, sheets, a small metal tensor lamp, the diary—and what there is is so minimal, so makeshift, less like a bed than a place where animals bed down, but spookier, like those caves one comes across sometimes in the canyons, fitted out with piles of rags and sterno stoves. But it’s also like a kid’s bed, those warm, rumpled fortresses of covers. Sitting on the edge of the bed, on the thin, washed-out sheets, Kate makes herself touch the wrinkled place where Rice must have slept. Then she picks up the diary, rereads the first entry, and goes on to the second:

  Our cells are the prisoners of protein. We must open them to new knowledge. Protein is only a program. We must reprogram our cells for cellulose. Even the words go together. We see and hear with our cells. Our cells hear the screams of the slaughterhouse

  And that’s all. Why does it scare her that Rice has left off the period after slaughterhouse? The rest is so meticulous. It’s crazy stuff, but no crazier than the stories one hears about the million-dollar health spa out on Orange Grove Road, its specialty coffee enemas. Rice can live without meat a few weeks, he can survive on egg rolls. But if cellulose is the point, why not celery, and why was Rice in her kitchen sniffing after the children’s cheese enchiladas?

  On the phone, Nicky says, “Doesn’t beer have protein?” And there is that shift sh
e hears in his voice when he’s been gone a few days; though he cares deeply, the house’s small problems are no longer his.

  “You’re thinking of vitamin B,” says Kate. “Anyway, Rice isn’t drinking. Or taking drugs.”

  “Rice not drinking or doing drugs?” Nicky says. “Jesus. Hey. Watch out.”

  Some nights, especially when they have chicken or veal, Kate thinks of sending one of the kids to get Rice. She tells herself she isn’t his mother, but still some part of her worries about Rice at work using power tools on a protein starvation diet. Motherhood has changed her, she’s become everyone’s mother, protective.

  Once more Kate finds herself watching for Rice—but now it’s for proof that she needn’t feel guilty, that Rice isn’t wasting away. She’s oddly proud of every day that passes without her snooping in Rice’s diary. She even learns to live with the lights in the little house left on; it’s a kind of discipline, or surrender. Spiritual homework.

  One afternoon Rice comes to the door and tells Kate his truck needs its ignition rewired. He asks if she’d mind if he fooled around with it in the backyard, after work. Kate minds very much. Rice specifically promised Nicky to make himself scarce. But Rice is always putting you in this position: his survival versus your convenience. At least auto repair seems like a sign that protein deprivation hasn’t damaged Rice’s brain.

  Rice and his truck take over the yard. Kate suspects him of using more tools than he needs. How many wrenches and ratchet sets and buckets and rags could rewiring require? Rice carries them out and in again each day. He is under the truck hood from when he gets home until dark, and though it irks Kate, she thinks: Well, better this than reading diet advice to the cat. What’s hardest is the recurring image of all those grimy tools in the guest house, seeping indelible black gunk into the white cement floor.

  In fact the reality is pretty much as she imagined, tools everywhere, little piles of greasy rags. Even Pinky has to share the table with a heap of pliers. But the books have been pushed to one side, and when Kate finds the diary—again, beside the bed—she is gratified to discover no entries past that second one, about reprogramming cells. Encouraged, she does a spot-check on the fridge, where, still, there are only egg rolls, stacked like tin-foil mummies.

  It has been a mild winter, but suddenly it turns clammy, cold rain every day. Rice stops working on his truck. Now when Kate spots him out the window, Rice wears a dungaree jacket, and hunches, pale and visibly chilled. Kate worries about the nights—the little house can get very cold. On the phone Nicky says, “Well, sure. That’s why we brought out the heater.”

  All morning Kate pictures the radiant heater, cooking away, streaming heat into the sofa or a brown paper garbage bag till the guest house goes up in flames. In any case, the electric bill will set a new world record. Around noon she goes over to check.

  In fact, the heater is off. The little house is really quite chilly and Pinky is yowling nonstop. Not two feet from the heater are some tools, heaped-up rags and a closed can of gasoline. Kate cannot believe it. Not even Rice is that dumb. She thinks about Pinky blown clear out the window like some charred, frazzled cartoon cat. Then she feels slightly sick.

  The diary is back on the table. The several entries past what she’s already seen are all variations on this:

  The cat is too dependent on me for its existence. I must teach it the art of rational fasting. It is easier down here. Pammy couldn’t do it. In that way I am further along on the path. The cat is nearly liberated from protein. What is the point of freedom if Pinky can’t be with us?

  Kate takes a hard look at Pinky, but can’t see any change; Pinky was always bone-thin. In the refrigerator is an empty, crusted-over catfood can. Kate runs back to her house, opens a can of Buster’s food, then comes back and dumps it in Pinky’s dish. Pinky dives right in. But is this extraordinary hunger or normal behavior? Kate has only Pammy’s word that Pinky’s a finicky eater. Cats are supposed to lick things clean—trust Pinky to leave smears of food on the dish. Kate cannot bring herself to rinse it.

  On the phone Nicky says, “It’s his cat, what do you care?” There’s a silence and then he says, “Joke.”

  “I’ll feed the cat,” says Kate. “I just want to make sure he moves that gas can and those rags.”

  “Then tell him,” says Nicky, as if it were as simple as that.

  Kate rehearses it in her head, aiming for a breezy tone: Oh, by the way, about that gas can…And breeziness might be an option if she’d started one conversation with him the whole time he’s been here. But now, even though—or because—he’s putting them at risk, she feels she’s been inhuman, done the minimum and no more. Not only that, she’s read his diary, sabotaged what precious little dignity Rice has. She cannot start right in scolding, lecturing Rice on his home safety habits, all that practiced breeziness turning instantly stony and tense. She waits a day and goes back; the heater and the gas can are just where they were.

  Soon after Rice gets back from work, Kate sends Ben over to invite him to dinner. Ben comes back almost immediately and says Rice is on his way. Is it okay if he brings the cat? Kate says, “So long as the cat doesn’t pee on the kitchen floor.” Ben says, “You tell him that,” and laughs. Rachel says, “God. Would it?”

  As usual, Rice’s face—friendly, bland, his eyes not quite meeting hers—shows nothing. Pinky is perched on his shoulder. In his jeans and denim jacket, with his ponytail and wispy beard, Rice looks like those kids you saw fifteen years ago at be-ins and still see sometimes at craft fairs. Even back then, you knew to stay away from the ones with animals on their shoulders.

  Kate says, “Should I set a place for the cat?” Anyone else would laugh. Anyone who was secretly starving his pet might betray a slight twinge of guilt. But Rice says, simply, “No thanks. I fed her before we came over.”

  How long before? thinks Kate. Three weeks? But she makes herself smile at Rice and says, “It’s all ready. Please. Have a seat.” Pinky stations herself on the floor behind Rice’s chair; Kate is about to say how Egyptian Pinky looks when she recalls reading something similar in Rice’s diary. Then she starts to ask what piece of chicken Rice wants when she remembers that the children are at that stage—they’ll fall off their chairs if someone says “breast” or “thigh.” So she gives Rice the serving fork and tells him, “Help yourself.”

  Rice takes a drumstick, a large dab of mashed potatoes and a stalk of broccoli and arranges them neatly on his dish. Kate remembers the old Rice heaping his plate and scarfing down mountains of food. Rachel and Ben stare at Rice—they’ve never seen a grown-up invest so much energy in making sure nothing touches. Rice waits till everyone is served, then takes a bite of mashed potatoes and a tiny piece of chicken and chews this mouthful forever. The kids look at him, then at Kate, then back. Kate says, “Kids, you’re not touching your food.” Without taking their eyes off Rice, the children begin eating—dutifully, almost as slowly as he does. Kate asks him, “How’s work?” Rice nods pleasantly and keeps chewing.

  After a while Rice takes a fingerful of mashed potatoes and, leaning down, feeds it to Pinky. Rachel says, “Ugh. Gross.”

  “She likes it,” says Rice.

  “I’ll bet she likes chicken better,” says Ben. Rice seems on the point of saying something, and Kate thinks now she’ll have to deal with the consequences of a lecture on reprogramming cats. But Rice’s face turns quizzical; he tears off a piece of drumstick and hands it down to Pinky, who tilts her head and eats it with no more or less relish than she showed for the mashed potatoes.

  “Pammy would kill me for this,” says Rice.

  Kate considers the pros and cons of asking, then can’t help herself. “Why’s that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Rice says. “She’s just kind of careful about what Pinky eats.”

  Rice watches Pinky briefly, then goes back to slow-motion eating. Well, Kate thinks, it’s nice to know that what people write in their diaries isn’t always true. No one on a seri
ous protein fast would be lured off his diet by plain baked chicken.

  Long after the children finish and go to their rooms, Rice is still eating. It takes all Kate’s forbearance not to get up and start clearing the table. She runs soothing thoughts through her mind: In a week Rice will be gone and Nicky will be here and her life will return to normal. So she’s actually slightly startled when Rice says, “Thanks, that was great.”

  Kate says, “I’m glad you liked it,” with something like genuine warmth. And then, because she’s given him that, she tells him in a rush that she had to go out to the little house, Nicky thought he might have left something there, and she couldn’t help noticing the gas can right by the heater, and it’s all right, she knows it’s nothing, but would Rice mind moving the can so she can stop thinking about it?

  First Rice says, “Listen, that gas can is closed.” Then he catches himself and says, “Yeah, sure, I can move it. No problem. Thanks for dinner.” And he’s gone.

  By and large, Kate’s pleased by how the evening went. She’s pretty sure Rice will move the gas can away from the heater. And she no longer has to feel guilty for not having fed her brother-in-law the whole time he was here. True, it was hard being patient, watching him chew. Later the children will ask about it, and she’ll tell them he likes his food chewed well. That they are still young enough to accept answers like that encourages her and makes her think: There’s time. When Nicky gets home they’ll figure out how to never spend another month like this.

  She stacks the dishes in the sink, then paints them with wavy lines of turquoise soap. She squeezes out as much soap as she needs and then goes on squeezing. She wishes she’d known as a child that grownups could do things like this and no one can tell them to stop. She fills the sink with warm water and, as her hands slide in, the pleasure is so intense she thinks: Do enough spiritual homework and every minute could be like this.