Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  That’s what Gilda’s thinking when the doorbell rings and why she has a rictus grin on her face and someone else’s tight voice in her mouth as she says, “Nathan, sweetheart, why didn’t you use your key?” What strikes Gilda right away is that Phoebe does look a bit like Amelia Earhart, that same clear wide forehead, those friendly wide-open eyes, and also a little—Gilda’s veering towards the cartoon again—like Betty Boop. What Gilda has been hoping for, of course, was someone more serious-looking, and homelier. Phoebe’s wearing a pink silk shirt, tight jeans, little heels. When Nathan introduces them, Phoebe grasps Gilda’s hand in both of hers, and Gilda wonders how those delicate arms can possibly heft all that heavy camera equipment.

  “Gilda?” Phoebe has enormous blue eyes and is shining them straight at Gilda. “Don’t tell me. Your mother saw Rita Hayworth in Gilda right before you were born.”

  “You got it,” says Gilda graciously, because she thinks she’s scored one off Phoebe: lots of people—movie buffs and nearly everyone over thirty-five—say the same thing. Gilda glances at Nathan to see if he’s noticed, but he’s too busy looking for somewhere to put Phoebe’s expensive-looking luggage. Then Phoebe says, “You know what I can’t stop thinking about? Rita Hayworth having Alzheimer’s. Forgetting all those beautiful nightgowns and how red her hair was and riding around in Ali Khan’s fast cars and getting her picture taken kneeling on those messed-up satin sheets…”

  Gilda, who’s been half-poised for a retreat to the kitchen, turns and stops, and it’s at this point that it occurs to her that she might actually like Phoebe Morrow. Not only has she been thinking, on and off for months and in much the same terms, about Rita Hayworth’s Alzheimer’s, but there’s something about that kind of thinking—a frank taste for celebrity gossip combined with a certain way of paying attention to the world and in particular to those ironies so appalling they seem both predictable and ultimately bizarre—which appeals to her in people.

  “As a matter of fact,” Phoebe says, “I wanted to go out to wherever she is and take pictures—”

  “That’d be a real change of pace for you,” says Nathan with a kind of desperate hopefulness which suddenly makes Gilda think of how their youngest son Danny—for years, afraid of the water—would brighten when he heard the other kids deciding it was too cold for them to swim, too.

  “But I didn’t think I could handle it,” says Phoebe, and then, noticing the surprise on both Gilda’s and Nathan’s faces, says, “It’s easier taking pictures of dead people.”

  There’s a silence during which Gilda thinks—and wonders if Nathan’s thinking—of the bitter disagreement they had when Nathan wanted to take pictures of Gilda’s grandfather in his coffin. Later, when Gilda was finally able to look at them, she understood that the photos were very moving and beautiful and really not ghoulish at all. Nevertheless, when she leafs through the book of Nathan’s photos, as she still occasionally does, she finds herself skipping that page.

  “You must be starving,” she says to Phoebe. “Come on, let’s eat.”

  It’s only within the last year or so that Gilda’s been able to set the table before guests arrive. She used to wait till they got there, then set out stacks of plates, silverware in a pile; it was a way of pretending she didn’t care. All that casualness was planned; that’s how nervous she is when strangers come to her house. Today she brings out an enormous tureen of hot mushroom soup she spent all yesterday making with heavy cream and mushrooms and fresh-grated nutmeg. She told herself she was giving the flavors an extra day to meld but the truth is, when she cooks the same day guests are coming she can’t eat, can’t even pretend; and though she explains all that, she often wonders if strangers suspect her of covering up some life-threatening appetite disorder.

  “Hey,” Nathan says, “this is unbelievably great,” and Gilda thinks how like him that is. He’s generous with everything—with praise, with blame, with enthusiasm, attention for the children. She wants to reach out and touch his hand, but finds it no easier now than it was twenty years ago when they first fell in love. Then it was shyness restraining her; now it’s the tactlessness of indulging in that cozy married-couple stuff in front of the unattached.

  “These are real mushrooms, aren’t they?” says Phoebe. “I mean, fresh mushrooms, you must have made this from scratch.” When Gilda nods, Phoebe says, “I’ve never had this before. Not real mushroom soup from scratch. Oh, Gilda, this is perfect, I can’t tell you what it means to me, it’s just what I needed, real hot homemade soup, it’s been years, I don’t think anyone but my mother’s ever made me homemade soup, and even she never made mushroom. When you’re living alone and traveling a lot you don’t get homemade anything.”

  The forlornness of this last bit makes Gilda glad she didn’t touch Nathan’s hand. At the same time she’s listening for a hint of the patronizing in all this talk of Mom’s hot homemade soup, and, when she doesn’t hear any, decides Phoebe’s pleasure is genuine. Suddenly Phoebe gets up and, standing on tiptoe, peers down into the soup tureen. It’s a peculiar gesture. Small as she is, Phoebe could see into the tureen if she just stayed flat on her feet. It’s meant to be childlike, meant to charm, but what interests Gilda is that a woman who’s gone on commando raids with Sandinista guerrillas would act like an eight-year-old to charm them. “All this soup for us?” Phoebe says.

  “I thought I’d make extra in case the students are hungry when they get here,” says Gilda and immediately regrets it, hating this image of herself: the homey, solid, faculty wife cooking nourishing soup for the students.

  “What students?” Phoebe asks.

  “We talked about this in the car,” Nathan says. “Some students begged me to let them come by a little later and meet you. I warned them you’d probably be exhausted. But you said it was okay. Is it okay? If it isn’t, if you’re tired or anything, it’s fine, I can call and ask them to come some other time—”

  “Sure it’s okay. I just forgot.” Phoebe’s voice has taken on such an odd drifty tone that Gilda begins to wonder if she might be suffering slightly from jet lag.

  “How long was your trip?” Gilda says.

  “Thirty-six hours,” says Phoebe. “We got hung up in the Athens airport. Hijack check. The worst part was sitting next to this big fat Palestinian businessman who kept trying to get me to go back and blow him in the airplane bathroom.”

  There’s a silence. Neither Gilda nor Nathan knows quite how to respond. Finally Gilda says, “Yuck,” realizing it’s a word she’s learned from the children. Suddenly she feels the need to bring the children—in spirit—into the room. She knows they’ve become a kind of talisman for her; when things turn unpleasant or even just socially strained, she runs through their names the way Catholics click off their rosaries.

  “You know,” Gilda says, “it’s a pleasure to cook soup like this for a change. Mostly I don’t get a chance. The children wouldn’t touch it with a stick.”

  “How many kids do you have?” Phoebe says, and Gilda’s—surprisingly—a little stung that Nathan didn’t tell her this in the car. Gilda can’t imagine riding for an hour with a stranger and not getting around to that. Though maybe he did, and maybe Phoebe forgot it the way she forgot the students.

  “Four,” Gilda says. “Sophie’s thirteen and Brian’s eleven and Ruthie’s nine and Danny’s seven.” Naming them like this makes Gilda acutely aware of how many there are; she feels like Phoebe’s a late arrival she’s just introduced to a roomful of guests whose names she’ll never remember.

  “Four?” says Phoebe, and Gilda waits for her to say more. What she’s found is that people’s responses are so predictable—and so repetitive. In that way having four children is rather like being named Gilda: you get to have the same conversation again and again.

  But all Phoebe says is, “That takes courage.” This isn’t dazzlingly original, either. Lots of people tell Gilda that, but so far none of them have been women who’ve spent the last ten years careening from war zone to wa
r zone. Gilda almost wants to make Phoebe repeat it for Nathan’s benefit since he doesn’t seem to be listening, but then Nathan says, “Courage? Stupidity’s more like it.”

  Though Nathan clearly means it as a joke, Gilda’s stunned by his betrayal. She knows he doesn’t feel that way about her or himself or the kids. She’s so shocked she hears herself babbling things she can’t believe she’s saying.

  “It really wasn’t courage,” she says. “What happened was, I became a kind of junkie. I got hooked on being pregnant and having babies and nursing, and once I got started I couldn’t quit. I’d miss the way newborns smell—their breath and the tops of their heads have this sweet smell, like candy—and the next thing I knew I was pregnant again.”

  Gilda looks over at Nathan, who’s smiling slightly and nodding. He knows what she means, and she feels that this shared knowledge shames him a little for what he’s just said. When Gilda was pregnant, he couldn’t get enough of her—of touching her, of taking her picture. The sad thing is that now, when she looks at his book, she skips over those photos too. Nathan also knows that what Gilda’s said is only three-quarters true. Danny was really an accident. By then they’d decided to stop having kids, not because they wanted to, but because they’d gotten superstitious. They’d been so lucky with the first three; they were frightened of pushing their luck. In fact, Danny turned out okay, but Gilda’s afraid he inherited all the terrors of that pregnancy; although he’s begun to outgrow it, he’s been, at one time or another, scared of nearly everything. Once, late at night in bed, Nathan referred to Danny as the runt of the litter and Gilda was horrified at first, then laughed, because his speaking her own worst fear out loud made her feel very close to him; it’s something only the other parent can get away with.

  Nathan says, “Gilda was the most beautiful pregnant woman you could imagine,” and it occurs to Gilda that Phoebe—that anyone who knows Nathan’s work—knows exactly how she looked pregnant. Though Gilda’s aware that they’re very consciously not talking shop here, she’s hoping that Phoebe will mention those pictures. But what Phoebe says is, “If you can’t cook the children mushroom soup, what can you cook them?”

  “Pizza,” says Nathan. “Endless pizza.”

  “What’s your favorite meal?” Phoebe asks Gilda, who’s so surprised that Phoebe would be interested that the only answer she can come up with is, “Linguine and steamed mussels with hot pepper flakes and garlic and parsley.” It’s true, she realizes, but if she’d thought a moment longer, she wouldn’t have been able to decide.

  “That sounds wonderful,” says Phoebe. “Maybe you can make it for me sometime.”

  “And yours?” Gilda says. “Your favorite?”

  Phoebe thinks for a while. “Airplane food,” she says at last, and her voice goes so vague and drifty again, it’s as if she’s flying away from them even as they sit there. Gilda’s afraid they’ve bored her with all this talk of children, and knows the time has come to ask about Phoebe’s courage—her career, her work. But what’s stopping her is this: if people repeat themselves so on the subject of Gilda’s name and four children, how much more repetitious must be the questions Phoebe hears all the time. Gilda longs to frame her question in a way no one’s happened on yet, but so much dead air’s flowing by that eventually she panics and says, “Have you ever been hit?”

  Phoebe looks at her strangely. “Only by my lovers,” she says. Gilda wonders if this is all Phoebe intends to say on the subject, and has the odd sensation that Phoebe’s saving her war stories for a larger and more satisfying audience. But then Phoebe says, “I’ll tell you a funny thing. Sometimes out in the field I get this feeling I’m invisible. That no one sees me, that I don’t exist. A bullet, a rocket—a bomb couldn’t find me. And in a way, I guess, I’ve learned to make myself invisible. It’s like I’m not there—it’s how I get all my best shots.”

  “What a great trick to know,” says Gilda. “How do you do it?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Phoebe says. “But I know when I started feeling that way: as a kid growing up in New York. I used to have to walk home from school along the Bowery, and the bums would all say these dirty things to me. I was terrified. So I’d practice making myself disappear so the bums wouldn’t see me—and that’s how I learned how to do it.”

  Gilda loves this story, this tale of childhood terror mined for power in later life. She hopes—and is embarrassed for reducing everything to this level again, but there it is—that something similar may work for Danny. She glances over at Nathan, who’s got the strangest look on his face. It’s hardly enchantment—that much seems clear. But that’s all Gilda knows. All those years of practice reading Nathan’s mind, and she hasn’t a clue to what’s on it.

  Just then the doorbell rings. “That’ll be the students,” says Nathan.

  “We’ll have dessert later,” Gilda says, and jumps up from the table.

  With each passing year Gilda finds herself avoiding Nathan’s students more determinedly. Mostly she’s disturbed that they stay the same age while she keeps getting older, but there’s also their dogged insistence on calling her Mrs. Wilson no matter how often she asks them to call her Gilda. It makes her feel like Dennis the Menace’s neighbor, or like the headmaster’s wife in some British public-school novel. One thing she knows is that she doesn’t want them calling her Mrs. Wilson in front of Phoebe, so she busies herself cleaning dishes while Nathan introduces Phoebe to the students—six of them, Gilda counts, three boys, three girls, though their nearly identical short punky haircuts and designer paratrooper clothes make this difficult to say for sure. It strikes Gilda as ironic that they are the ones dressed like Green Berets while Phoebe, who’s probably actually jumped out of airplanes, is wearing silk and those tiny high heels. Making extra trips so as to have something involving to do, Gilda imagines that she’s the downstairs maid, and might as well be for all the attention anyone pays her until she shoos them into the living room, urging them to talk and relax while she makes coffee and whips the cream for dessert.

  The noise of the electric beater is wonderfully soothing. It blots out everything else as Gilda concentrates on the small miracle of white liquid turning into white solid. She watches the coffee brew, drip by drip, and when she turns away from the counter, she’s touched to find Nathan leaning against the doorway between the kitchen and living room, as if he’s reluctant to leave her alone in there, working. Hearing Phoebe’s clear voice ringing from the other room, Gilda goes and stands beside Nathan to look at what he’s watching: Phoebe on the sofa with all the students seated in a circle on the floor, literally at her feet.

  Phoebe’s in the middle of a story, and it takes Gilda a while to get the gist of it, to realize that Phoebe’s volunteering all this, or else the students have been less circumspect than Gilda and Nathan in grilling her for the details of her paramilitary career.

  “I had a lover,” Phoebe’s saying, “a Palestinian commando, trained as a fighter pilot. He’d take me on missions with him so I could take aerial shots of all the bases. Most of them I sold to Newsweek. When things calmed down we’d make love everywhere, even standing up in the airplane bathroom.”

  “Bathrooms on fighter planes?” Gilda whispers to Nathan, but Nathan puts a finger to her lips and says, “Shhh.”

  “Then one day,” says Phoebe, “we took some Israeli fire. We got hit, we went down. My lover was killed. The next thing I knew, I was in an Israeli medivac unit with sixty-two pieces of shrapnel in my back, one in this really strategic place near the base of my spine.”

  The students make various appreciative, prayerful noises. Wow. Jesus. God. Holy Christ.

  “They told me,” Phoebe continues, “that I’d been in a coma for thirty-six hours. But here’s what I remember: when I opened my eyes, there was this beautiful Israeli nurse. A redhead. She looked just like Rita Hayworth. She had on this great perfume—it smelled like a newborn baby, like candy. And she was bringing me food—homemade mushroom soup, made with re
al mushrooms from scratch. I’d never had it before, and oh, it was just what I needed. I got to be a kind of junkie for it; once I got started I couldn’t stop. And when I began to feel better, she brought me—without my even asking for it—my favorite food: linguine with steamed mussels, hot pepper flakes, garlic, and parsley.”

  Gilda and Nathan linger a moment to see if Phoebe realizes they’re watching her from the doorway. But she’s focused on the middle distance, completely intent on her story; she doesn’t know they’re there.

  Gilda grabs Nathan’s hand and pulls him into the kitchen and lets the door swing shut behind them. Gilda’s got chills running down her spine, but before she says anything, she wants to be accurate, to know precisely what kind of chills they are. At first she thinks this is how she might feel if she’d come home to find Phoebe trying on all her clothes. But what’s happened, she realizes, is less frightening, eerier and more distant—more like the startled, upset way she felt last summer when she found a bird’s nest into which had been woven, unmistakably, swatches of that red plaid shirt of Danny’s that had mysteriously disappeared from the line. Mostly what concerns Gilda now is that Phoebe be gone before the children get back. How different from her earlier fantasy: that they’d come home early enough for her to show them off. Now Gilda’s afraid that if Phoebe meets them, she’ll steal something from them too.

  Nathan says, “Do me a favor. Don’t offer those kids out there any of that mushroom soup. Then they’ll really know something’s weird.”

  Gilda nods, then says, “Did you know about this?”