Saying Grace

by Beth Gutcheon

  “Unless we decide to retire and move to the Seychelles.”

  They sat quietly, content to be together, and to let their thoughts wander.

  “I don’t suppose Georgia remembered my birthday,” Rue said at last.

  “It seems not. I should have reminded her.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  After dinner, they planned to walk up the ridge, but a light drizzle had begun to fall.

  “Let’s go to the Japanese Baths then,” said Rue.

  Henry was shocked. “We don’t have bathing suits!”

  “The little card they put in our room said Bathing Suits Optional. Which means Bathing Suits de Trop.”

  “I thought you said this wouldn’t require a new wardrobe.”

  “Come on,” said Rue. “Let’s just look.”

  The bath house was deserted. Steam rose from the water and you could see the stars through intermittent clouds through the open lattice of the roof.

  “Come on,” said Rue.

  “What if other people come and want to have group sex? Or laugh at my penis?”

  “That will be bad,” said Rue. She had put her clothes in a locker and was slipping naked into the water. Henry eventually joined her, and no one else arrived, and they floated under the stars, whispering and kissing and giggling, until Henry said he was too wrinkled and had to go home.

  They spent the next day hiking on the headlands. The weather was cool and bright and wild. The hotel packed them a lunch and lent Henry a backpack.

  In the morning, they talked about the Peace Corps. They had never gone because they couldn’t afford it. Henry had to pay off student loans.

  “If we had gone, how would our lives be different?”

  “You wouldn’t have finished your Ph.D.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “Would it matter?”

  “I don’t think so. Not very much. That last year in Cambridge was fun though.”

  “It was. Remember the house in Somerville?”

  “Whatever happened to that strange guy who always wore bicycle clips and kept all those canaries in his room? And made margaritas in the blender when his girlfriend came, and they never seemed to eat any food?”

  “Was he in physics?”

  “Economics.”

  “And that couple from the law school with the little MG that wouldn’t start when it rained?”

  “She’s a judge now. In Arizona.”

  “Are they still married?”

  “Oh, no. He had a pants problem.”

  “Did he? When did he find the time?”

  “You might well ask.”

  “And remember the girl from your boarding school who went back and told everyone you were living in a commune?”

  “Oh, I loved that! Quelle scandale.”

  They stopped to admire the view. Henry said, “Why don’t we go to the Peace Corps now?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. We could go to Africa.”

  “Or Indonesia. Where they ate Michael Rockefeller.”

  “Why don’t we?”

  “Are you tired of cutting open heads?”

  They began to walk again.

  “I’d love to try something else,” he said. “You know. Save lives. Save the world. Something modest.”

  “You could work with children. Come over to school, we’re about to have a chicken pox epidemic.”

  They let the subject drop for a while and soon stopped for lunch. They ate leaning against a rock, looking west across the ocean. There were gulls and occasional pelicans. Rue thought of Catherine Trainer, and how she would love the birds here.

  When they started to walk again after lunch, Henry brought up the subject of starting over again, but in a different way. “We’ve never talked about how long you want to stay at Country,” he said.

  “No, but of course I think about it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “The world is changing. The school is changing. Remember when Georgia was born, how people talked about the whole child, and started schools where they believed in granola and banning television and not letting children play with guns? Now, no one gives a shit about any of that. Now they just want to get their kids into the best high school, so they can all go to Stanford or Yale, and if they don’t know anything about peace or the downtrodden or being a good person, who cares?”

  “Well, some of them care, or they wouldn’t send their kids to you. They’d all be over at Poly.”

  “I hope that’s true.”

  “Are you ever going to write a book?” Henry asked her.

  “Me?”

  “You used to talk about it, when you were in graduate school.”

  “I used to talk about retiring at fifty and doing a bachelor of science.”

  “I thought that was a great idea. Aren’t you tempted?”

  “Are you having a midlife crisis?”

  “Maybe.”

  They stopped on a bluff and looked out over the Pacific.

  “I want to go somewhere,” Henry said, unconscious that he was flexing his arms and shoulders as if preparing to brachiate. “I want to see something different. Remember how it felt, when we all thought we could stop the war and change the world and raise little boys who wouldn’t grow up to be sexist assholes? And little girls who would be sexist assholes and want to run Morgan Stanley?”

  Rue looked at him. He looked as if he felt caged. She did remember what it felt like to be so young and to believe your generation was different. She smiled and touched him. She said, “Remember, we thought that if we lived to fifty, we would stop war and landfills and no one would eat meat?”

  “No one would use Saran Wrap or plastic cartons; we’d all keep glass bottles and those reusable bowl and bottle covers that looked like shower caps?”

  “And wash everything over and over,” she said. “That was before we knew about the drought.”

  “What we thought,” said Henry, “was that you could change the world by behaving as if what one person does makes a difference.”

  “That’s it,” said Rue, taking his hand. “That was it.” She was remembering what it was like when she first fell in love with him. She felt she had made a difference in his life, just by being herself. And she felt as if he had made her life make sense.

  “I’m not dead yet,” said Henry, “and I want to feel like that again.”

  She turned to meet his eyes. What was this? It was serious.

  “But you do make a difference…think of your patients.”

  “I think of them. I think that there are two people in my own practice who could do exactly what I’m doing as well as I’m doing it. But I could use my training in places where it’s really needed. I’m sick of conversations about health plans. How about going where there isn’t any health plan because there aren’t any doctors?”

  Rue didn’t know what to say. She felt as if she was making a difference. She didn’t think that teachers were interchangeable, or that schools were. She thought that what she did could change people’s lives. You could argue all day about whether it was less noble to affect these lives than the lives of children starving in Somalia. She was doing what she was trained to do. Children were children. The ones at Country were hers. They had lives to live, and gifts to give.

  “What about Georgia?” Rue asked. “If we left the hemisphere?”

  “She’d be fine,” said Henry. “A kid who doesn’t remember her mother’s birthday is not pining for home.”

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t need us to be here when she needs us.”

  “You’ve got to give her up, Rue. She’s gone.”

  “I know she’s gone, Henry,” said Rue, slightly annoyed. She didn’t think Henry was any more blithe than she about admitting Georgia was gone. In fact, she thought he was looking for drama and romance as a way of distracting himself from the loss. Not just of Georgia but of that whole part of their life together. At that moment, she r
ealized that she profoundly did not want to go to Somalia. She wanted to finish the work she had started, in her own time and her own way, until the pattern of the life work she had chosen emerged from the background whole, so she could see its meaning and carry that forward into the next part of her life. Whatever that was, whenever it was time. It wasn’t time yet. Rue did not like to have change thrust upon her.

  “I think about those days before we had Georgia,” she said, “and I don’t feel like a different person. I feel older, but I don’t feel as if I had dreams and then forgot them. I feel as if I’m doing what I was meant to do.”

  “You are very lucky,” said Henry.

  The sun was high in the afternoon sky, and they chose another path and walked on.

  Work Day was a sort of family outing at The Country School. Parents would bring their own tools and paint, rake, build fences, level brick paths, or weed the flower beds. Emily was delighted to sign up, since what she should have been doing was ripping up the linoleum in her own kitchen so she could put down a subfloor and lay some decent tiles. She had promised to do this to show Malone she loved her, even though Malone said, when she had to miss Jennifer Lowen’s birthday party, that she thought her mother was a complete turd and would think so till the day she died. Even on your wedding day? Emily had asked. Yes, said Malone. Emily would be allowed to attend the wedding and could stand in the receiving line, but inside Malone would still think she was a complete turd.

  When the Work Day dawned sunny, Emily decided her floor would wait. She gathered up the kids and took them up to school. The children went off to help Manuel in the garden. Emily found herself assigned to help Henry and Chandler Kip build a picket fence at the preschool.

  They had a great time, after Henry and Chandler straightened out what kind of music they were going to listen to. “You’re kidding,” Henry bellowed. “You don’t know ‘There Ain’t No Instant Replay in the Football Game of Life?’” Chandler seemed unsure how to take Henry’s sense of humor.

  Henry insisted that to be politically correct they would have to let Emily use the Skilsaw while the men hammered. (This was probably the safest course as well as the most correct, since Chandler did not appear to have much experience dealing with the physical universe.) Then they tried to get Emily to mix the concrete to hold the uprights, but she said it was entirely too domestic, all that measuring and stirring. She liked the power saw. “Measure twice, cut once,” Henry kept saying. He said that was the way they did it in the operating room, when they started on the skulls.

  Late in the morning, Malone appeared with David, who was weeping.

  “What happened, Lovie—are you hurt?” she asked David, who burrowed into her arms, sniffling.

  “Lyndie decided to torture him,” said Malone. Malone was upset.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She found this file thing that was pointed, and she asked me what it was for and I didn’t know, so she went over to David and started poking him with it.”

  “Had he been bothering you?”

  “No! He was just digging a hole! He went ‘Stop it, that hurts,’ and she just kept on, and I went ‘Stop it Lyndie, you’re hurting him!’ But she didn’t stop!”

  Emily studied Malone’s indignant face. She stroked David’s hair.

  “Poor you,” she said to him. David nodded. Malone looked to her mother as if there must be an explanation for this, but Emily didn’t know of one.

  “Thank you, honeybunch. David can stay and help us. Will you help us?” she asked him. He nodded. Malone shrugged and went off. Emily went back to work, troubled. She had noticed Lyndie wasn’t very patient with David, but this was like pulling the wings off flies.

  Rue had spent the morning gardening with some new kindergarten parents in the shrubbery beds around the gym, and together they walked to the outdoor barbecue hosted by the Lowen and Malko families. Bradley Lowen was cooking hamburgers, Corinne Lowen and Margee Malko were dishing up pasta and potato salads. As Rue was joined by various campus pets and the young mothers were joined by their happy dirty spouses and children, converging from other parts of the campus, Rue was surprised to see Sondra Sale standing by herself in the lunch line.

  During registration this morning, Rue had seen Sondra drop off her children and drive away, as if she thought the point of the day was free Saturday babysitting. Surely she couldn’t have thought Jonathan was going to be of substantial assistance laying brick or planting pear trees, or Lyndie either, with her arm in a cast. Corinne Lowen had had to delegate two eighth graders to babysit Jonathan. He had walked off between them, licking away at the palm of his hand. Lyndie had gone off to find Malone and Jennifer.

  Now, as Rue looked around for a table full of parents she didn’t know well, so she could join them for lunch, she noticed Sondra Sale standing silent with a plate in her hand. She was dressed in spotless white denim; Rue wondered if she had come to work and those were indeed her work clothes. Then her attention was taken by Terry Malko, who put an arm around her shoulder and said, “Chandler just told me a joke. Want to hear it?”

  “I didn’t know he knew any,” said Rue.

  “What’s the definition of a preppie?”

  “What?”

  “Someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” They both laughed.

  “I knew you’d like that,” said Terry. He hurried off to make sure there was enough ice in the washtubs full of soft drinks. Terry and Chandler both had achieved enough success in business to become more Republican than the Social Register, and certainly their children were being raised to expect the best of everything. And yet she knew that if anyone was supposed to feel the butt of that joke, it was Henry, and by extension she herself.

  She chose a table with two young couples and their preschool children, and asked if she could join them. Happily they cleared a sleeping infant in a car seat off the table to make room for her. “I’m Rue Shaw,” she said. “We know!” they caroled. And there began happy talk about what each adult had been working at for the morning, and what a nice day it was, and how at their old school there was nothing like this, no sense of belonging, no way to help or to feel that the school was your own. As Rue ate, she noticed Henry and Emily in line, with paint on their hands and clothes. And to her surprise, she also noticed Sondra sitting apart on a stone wall, picking at a plate of lettuce leaves and talking to Bonnie Fleming.

  “How can you eat that cake and keep that figure?” were the first words Sondra addressed to Bonnie. It had none of the flavor of an opening gambit signaling a wish to make an acquaintance. Bonnie felt it was a literal request for information. She looked at her plate piled with salads and bread and a slice of coconut cake.

  “I don’t eat meat or cheese,” Bonnie said. “Maybe that’s it.”

  Sondra looked at Bonnie’s long-boned willowy figure, a flat appraisal. It was like the look of a child who has not been told that it’s impolite to stare. Or ask personal questions.

  “You’re so thin,” she said to Bonnie, almost as if it were disagreeable of Bonnie to be so.

  “I think a lot of it is genes,” said Bonnie. “My mother is very thin as well.”

  “I was real fat when I was a teenager,” said Sondra, putting a leaf into her mouth.

  “You have a beautiful figure now,” said Bonnie.

  Sondra nodded, chewing. “I work at it. I have to take about four aerobics classes a day or I blow up like a cow. Lyndie could get fat when she gets the curse. That’s what happened to me. I watch her diet, but I see the signs. She could really blow up.”

  “Are you Sondra?” Bonnie asked.

  Sondra nodded. It was as if she thought everyone here must know who she was, since they all seemed to know each other. That’s what the world had kind of seemed to her for her whole life, like a big group of people who already know each other and you don’t.

  “I’m Bonnie.” Sondra said, “Nice to meet you,” and for a while they both chewed, like horses side by s
ide in their stalls.

  “I used to dance,” said Bonnie, “so I got a lot of exercise. Now I don’t get as much as you. But I have today; Mike Dianda and I have been double-digging a plot for a kitchen garden, so the science classes can grow vegetables. Whew! that’s hard.”

  Sondra looked at her with that flat gaze. “Mr. Dianda? The one in the office?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is he, is he her secretary?”

  “Mrs. Shaw’s? No, he’s the assistant head.”

  “I thought assistant was secretary.”

  “It’s more that she’s the president and he’s the vice president.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So he’s important?”

  Bonnie nodded. She wanted to say that in the great scheme of things they were all important, secretaries and presidents, but she hadn’t sensed in Mrs. Sale any sense of humor, let alone any sense of her own affect. Lacking that, she was unlikely to take any pleasure in even the gentlest teasing. Alas, they would share no bonding laughter.

  “Isn’t he a fairy?”

  Bonnie was so surprised that she didn’t react. Sondra was looking at her in the usual flat way, again seeming unaware of any possibility of giving offense. Bonnie wondered if this disconnected manner had to do with living with such a frightening man as her husband. Had she retreated into childishness? Or had she married him because she was poor at reading nonverbal clues and thus had not noticed what seemed so obvious to others, his angry arrogance, the way his knotted body seemed to announce his discomfort in the universe.

  Bonnie said, “Yes, he is.” That seemed to satisfy Sondra, who then reverted to her primary topic, which seemed to be food.

  “My mother was a cook,” said Sondra. “Once she won a Pillsbury bake-off, you know you send in your recipe to the magazine and it’s a contest?”

  “Did she really?”

  “Yes, but she couldn’t go get the prize because you have to tell your name and what you do, and they check, because there are rules, you can’t be professional, you can’t work for the magazine, things like that.”

  Bonnie was lost. “It was a chicken recipe,” Sondra went on, “that you rolled in cornflakes, and then you cooked it with pineapple. Hawaiian. We had lived in Hawaii once. But we were in St. Louis by the time she won.”