The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  Bill has taken his second favorite chair—a distant second— where for five minutes he riffles through the evening paper and rises again, gazing around the living room as if he has become a guest. He has nothing to say, and this appears to confound him. It’s not the usual thing, this living room display of tears: Elaine prefers to go to her room when she’s upset, but the telephone is here, the possibility of Daphne is here, next to her father’s favorite chair, and here she waits. Bill stands. He takes a step in Elaine’s direction and frowns. She is a little afraid of him, both the girls are—Elaine freezes in place—but he shakes his head and turns away, now hurrying out toward his study.

  Sadie does pick up Dinner at Antoine’s, takes the chair Bill’s abandoned, and tries to read despite Elaine’s sniffling, but now the book itself seems more melodramatic (weepier?) than it did yesterday— or is she just seeing it clearly now?—in any case unsatisfying. Dinner at Antoine’s is not what she wants at all. She does have other books, one that Goldie mentioned in a letter, a few classics she returns to. She could dig out something by Austen, or a Brontë. But they do not seem right either. She starts again from the beginning and reads with half-attention, nearly ten pages, before Margo intrudes. “Mother?” A call from the kitchen in a voice both plaintive and demanding. It is not the voice of math homework, which Margo has agreed to spend a full hour on.

  The call is followed by footsteps, and Margo’s own appearance in the living room. At the sight of Elaine, Margo huffs but stops short of calling Elaine a baby. Margo has a lead in her high school’s production of Anything Goes, which opens in three weeks—her world, and apparently Sadie’s, must this instant revolve around the accuracy of the costume Sadie is sewing for her. Margo has requested blue spangles for the bodice and sleeves. Sadie has procured blue spangles, and they are on the kitchen counter, and it is time, Margo believes, to discuss them. Otherwise she cannot concentrate properly on her math.

  Sadie does not remember demanding spangles as a girl, but she was young in a different life. In this life—the life she wanted— teenagers desire precise glitter. She follows Margo to the kitchen and takes up the cards of spangles, blue, shiny disks that catch the light and will no doubt increase the costume’s glamour.

  Margo flicks a hand at them. “Not these.”

  “What do you mean?” Sadie says. “Blue spangles. You wrote that on your list. Here they are.”

  “Smaller ones,” she says. “They should be elegant.” Margo wants more subtle spangles, the kind, it seems, an actual heiress rather than a stage one might wear. True, Margo is looking more and more like an Italian starlet, she’s a striking girl, but this is high school, this is Anything Goes.

  “No one will know the difference,” Sadie says.

  “Of course they will,” Margo says, and more to the point, she herself will. How is she to be convincing if she herself is unconvinced?

  Margo is sixteen.

  “Math,” Sadie says. “Finish your homework.”

  The telephone rings and Sadie starts, as she always starts, bracing herself for Jo. There is a long pause, and then muffled talk in the living room, and Elaine’s more audible, emphatic “I’m sorry too.” In the kitchen Margo rolls her eyes. Ignoring her homework, she begins to sketch her character, Hope, lounging on an ocean liner.

  Would boys have been easier? Sadie can’t imagine: she pictures a herd of goats climbing over the furniture and chewing up her rugs, though Irving was sweet enough as a boy. She wishes her daughters would befriend each other, but Margo and Elaine are happiest apart, off with their separate friends. They seem in these matters unteachable, but perhaps Sadie does not know how to teach them. Her relationship to her own sisters is no example. And isn’t she herself plainly happy when alone with her friend Anna?

  “Tomorrow . . . ,” Elaine says in the living room. “Let’s not.” Margo draws the ideal spangle to scale. “ ’Bye, Daphne.” Elaine shuffles into the kitchen with her empty chocolate cup, puffy-faced but better, a hint of a smile. She picks up a card of the oversized spangles and notes the way they catch the light from the ceiling lamp. “They’re beautiful,” she says. “I think they’re perfect.”

  Margo snorts. “You would.”

  Elaine blushes and leaves the card on the table and slips out of the room, but takes her revenge by practicing piano scales.

  SADIE WANTS respite—that she knows—but wanting respite is different from, say, wanting hot chocolate or something grander. This week she’s actually had respite: no sign of migraines and no sign of Jo, who is angry with her for once again suggesting Celia see a doctor. Jo says she does not believe in doctors, as one might not believe in leprechauns. It isn’t clear what Jo does believe in, or what she thinks will help Celia, who for months has complained of dizziness and headaches.

  Sadie’s last attempt to get Celia medical care, in September, was in all ways a fiasco. She’d persuaded Dr. Weintraub to make a house call, and he had not been daunted by Celia’s unwashed state, her matted hair, her distraction. But Celia would not answer his questions and would not let him touch her even to take her pulse. He took a stethoscope out of his bag and Jo, who was hovering, swore at him. She called him a death mongrel and insisted he leave the house immediately.

  Sadie took Jo’s arm and tried to tug her out into the hallway, away from the doctor, from Celia. “What’s gotten into you?”

  Jo shook her off. “I’ll call the police,” she said. “Don’t think I won’t.”

  Then Celia fled. And as Dr. Weintraub hurried out of the house, it seemed as if he’d discovered Sadie herself unwashed and belligerent. She left Lancaster without speaking to her sisters and slowly drove to Dr. Weintraub’s office, where she paid his house call fee and pretended not to be mortified. She asked for his discretion with regard to her family.

  “Of course,” he said. He gazed at her through black-framed glasses, his hair balding in a pattern like Bill’s, and added dryly, “Apparently I am not the doctor for your sister.”

  Over the past several weeks, Sadie has left ice packs and aspirin and her own migraine pills at Lancaster, but Celia’s complaints have persisted, and more than once Sadie’s found her in midafternoon lying in the dark of her bedroom. This week Sadie suggested Celia have a phone consultation with a doctor, and for a moment it seemed Celia would consider it, but Celia replied quietly, “They just make things worse.”

  Jo started in, telling Sadie to keep her nose in her own business, and then Sadie lost her own patience—she should not have, she knows that—and smacked the coffee table with her hand and announced that Jo was being ridiculous. This helped no one. Sadie returned to her own house, and neither Jo nor Celia called.

  It was time to relent, and Sadie found guilty relief in relenting. She had her own family to watch out for, other matters to contend with: the creeping strangeness of time, the effort to ignore it.

  AFTER HER FATHER’S death, the world devolved into a rougher, less refined place, and Sadie became sharply aware of Bill as an anchor, a solid if not an easy anchor, without whom she might drift out of ordinary life into the ether. Too much drifting—beyond novels, beyond sleep—and you are lost, maybe the way Celia is. Bill does not drift, or condone drifting of most sorts, except when listening to music, slow jazz and show tunes on the radio. Another side of him unfurls then, a quiet attentive side, as when he is piecing together a mystery, or momentarily arranging the flowers he brings home for her each week. He loses his bluster when he listens to music, yet remains entirely, unflaggingly Bill. And when there’s no bad news, when Bill’s attentive and sweet, there is a delicate smoothness to the air, an ease in the way her body moves. She likes their public life as a couple, the dinners and temple work, the dances and the Saturday night restaurants. Isn’t this what she wanted? A world away from Lancaster, a world of proper dressing and music and polite waiters smiling as they seat her at the corner table? And at night in bed, when she and Bill are finished with the business of touching and pleasure and lostn
ess, she’s comforted by the strong if temporary sense that there is only this world of the bed, with its clean linens and warmth, their sleep-closeness one of a safe if not wholly harmonious ship.

  Whose marriage is, after all, wholly harmonious? Whose family? Bill is a man of strong opinions, his stubbornness irks her—you can see where Margo’s comes from—but she tries not to react, instead training her mind on errands. It’s true, Bill is stern with his daughters, they do not know him beyond the sternness at times, and yet he is devoted to them. The house does not sink into the ground, they are fed and bought dresses and offered dance lessons, treated to restaurants and chocolate and boxes of bubble gum. They want for nothing. They are loved if not understood and if not in a way they understand. Sadie wanted a good life. He has made one for all of them.

  Tonight she finds him again after the girls have gone to bed, and the house itself seems an animal asleep. Bill is sitting on the edge of the bed in the blue-striped pajamas she gave him, rubbing a spot in the middle of his forehead and setting his glasses on the night table. Bluish half-circles swell below his eyes. He’s pale from working too much again. It’s late enough that he should not receive calls from patients: that sort of emergency is rare, though it occurs. When it does he drops whatever he is doing and disappears to his other world, the dental world, returning in the small hours. He can be a kind of dental hero, but heroism wears everyone out.

  “What’s this with Elaine?” he says.

  “It’s over,” Sadie says. “She drank hot chocolate. She’s fine.”

  “And Margo?”

  “Nervous about her play. No more than that.”

  “I don’t like her tone with you.”

  “She’s fine.”

  And then he waits. It’s the time when she might tell him about Lancaster, or of occasional news from his family, but today she will say nothing. Let him enjoy that silence, the lack of calls, the fact that the telephone ringing was only thirteen-year-old Daphne Farber. Bill waits and understanding dawns, marked by his relieved smile before the yawn and the goodnight kiss.

  The yawn then, the goodnight kiss. In ten minutes he is asleep. In the morning he’s gone before she’s fully dressed. The girls quietly eat their scrambled eggs and toast and gather their school-books. Margo studiously ignores Elaine, remaining unaware of three blue spangles stitched to Elaine’s notebook, beside Elaine’s curving signature.

  SOMETIMES A FREE afternoon downtown—Main Street flooded with coats and hats, a rush of voices, and the brick buildings gilded and slightly pink, the clouds orange and violet before dusk—seems wholly enough. It is a good life, she’s sure, though she doesn’t know why it seems so tentative and airy, or why the past seems to spring up at her as if in defiance, or how to name what she feels, even to Anna, her closest friend. She is at the art museum with Anna, gazing at a marble statue she’s seen many times before, and the quality of another time begins to superimpose itself on the day: a time before she had children, when she would visit the statue and pretend she was in Italy. She’d close her eyes and picture cities she’d only read about, letting Buffalo melt beneath a brilliant light. She told no one of these moments: she did not know if anyone other than Celia might have them. But here she is with Anna, and here is the statue, and she is not closing her eyes, and nonetheless the moment of Italy rushes upon her. Her face is hot, her breathing too fast. In her peripheral vision, an imaginary Florence rises, and Rome, a shimmering sense of the Sistine Chapel’s nearness, a feeling of light. She’s forgotten that the mind can do such things, and she is concentrating on the statue’s blank white marble pedestal, trying to name this leap in memory, when Anna asks if she’s all right. Apparently she is weeping. On hearing Anna’s voice she stops.

  She isn’t sure how to answer, caught like this. She could say, I was missing my father, which Anna would understand, of course. Anna misses her own late father. But even as the words form themselves they seem partial and inadequate, true and untrue. The world without Sadie’s father continues to shock her, as she was shocked initially. The air became drained of color, which she did not expect. Even the depth of her attachment shocked her: he had been a difficult and private man, and yet there it was, the world for a time drained of color. But here the color rushes back, the Italy moment she’d forgotten. How ungraspable everything seems— Anna, the museum, the fact of a country called Italy, the fact of years, the marvel of light, her daughters, the fleeing of moments only glimpsed, the fleeing of her father. Light fell on Italy. Had her father seen light fall on Italy? How little she’d known him. How little she knows the world.

  But Anna is waiting, and they are in a gallery, and other people stroll the gallery. She’s tearing up in public.

  “Sadie, what is it?” Anna says.

  “I don’t know.”

  Anna nods. “Would you like to sit down?”

  But Sadie does not know the answer to that either: for the moment all certainties seem elusive. Maybe she wants to sit, maybe she does not. The uncertainty seems to bubble beneath her ribs and expand into her throat. Another wave of heat begins in her face. Anna takes her hand.

  “Let’s sit for a minute,” Anna says. “My shoes pinch today.”

  “They pinch?” Sadie refocuses on Anna’s sable leather pumps. They are beautiful troublesome shoes. “I didn’t know.” The two women study Anna’s small feet. It’s all a matter of locating the problem, isn’t it?

  “It’s only the second time I’ve worn them.”

  There is the immediate need for relief from the pinching, and the decision then to go to the ladies’ lounge where they might try to stretch the offending shoe and find some tissue to pad Anna’s foot. Does Anna have moleskin at home? They leave the gallery and the Italian statue and in the lounge Anna fusses with her shoe and Sadie reapplies lipstick. Sadie is no longer weepy; the weepiness, the entire wave of feeling, seems to have passed. Perhaps they should get something sweet, she tells Anna. She’s had enough art for one day. There might be just enough time to stop for coffee before the school day ends, before Anna’s sons and Sadie’s daughters reappear, and Sadie and Anna again become mothers.

  IF SHE HAD more time, perhaps she would feel surer of herself. There’s always a feeling of hurry, of catching up, only glimpsing each moment before it shifts. She would like to be prepared, but only the small gestures seem manageable: school clothes for the girls, dry cleaning, groceries. She wants to be a good mother, gives motherhood her best effort. Sometimes her daughters listen to her and sometimes they do not. It’s Rosalie who persuades Margo to use the spangles Sadie bought, telling her “they need to be bold for shows.” Rosalie Margo listens to in a way she will not listen to Sadie, and for an afternoon, Sadie is caught between gratitude and hurt, unable to settle into the casual pleasure of the day. She is unnecessarily formal with Rosalie, who is unnecessarily formal in return.

  She wants her daughters to be happy, and for the most part they seem so. The opening night of Anything Goes, Margo’s elated, but also on stage transformed to a girl more glamorous and adult than the Margo Sadie knows, an heiress on a luxury liner, someone Sadie has in fact never met. This she is unprepared for; she is unnerved. The spangles are convincing, perhaps too much so, and it’s a relief to see Margo backstage after the play, clutching her bouquet of sweetheart roses, returned to her headstrong, familiar self. Stay Margo, Sadie thinks. There will be three more performances, and Sadie has promised to attend the closing show, if not every single performance. She loves her daughter. “You were marvelous,” Sadie tells Margo. “I can’t wait to see it again.”

  SHE WOULD LIKE to forestall crisis—this too is not the same as desire—and the days can seem a shoring up against disaster. She has become skilled at averting small, imaginable crises, at pushing the larger threats to the shadows of thought, but it requires vigilance. And she’s not ready, the Thursday morning the telephone rings, and it isn’t Jo—there’s a flicker of relief—but Buffalo General Hospital—the flicker doused. Celia’
s been admitted, having fallen unconscious on a city bus. The woman on the phone is kind, almost familiar, the call itself both shocking and plainly factual. There’s a moment of paralysis, a searching for words, and finally the release of adrenaline. Then motion replaces feeling, and the early particularities of the day recede, everything but the call recedes.

  When Sadie arrives at the hospital, she is fixed on the reception desk. Poise depends on taking one issue at a time, negotiating the larger problem but addressing the smaller ones, the question of Celia’s location, her status, her doctor. It is the kind of situation in which crying or losing one’s temper is out of the question: you do not compound a collapse with another type of collapse. Sadie is directed to a green-and-beige waiting room, where a few people— a couple of women, an old man—swim in their separate worries and Irving fidgets in his chair.

  “Unresponsive so far,” Irving says. “That’s what the doctor said. Ten minutes ago, maybe.” His voice seems altered by the sea fog of the room, the words also tinted green and beige in the thick static air. An old man glances up at Sadie and does not look away. On the far side of the room, a ballooning woman in a violet dress studies her feet. Irving remembers to greet Sadie then: he kisses her on the cheek and offers her his small silver flask, which she declines.

  “Where’s Jo?”

  “Got me,” Irving says. “They called her.”

  The waiting room crowds up for a while, empties, but remains a jittery sea fog. In his chair Irving appears smaller than usual, as if shrunken by unhappiness and worry, which surprises Sadie: she usually sees this expression when he’s panicked about money. It’s the expression that frightens her into writing checks, and check writing will not work today. She’ll have to find another way to harness fear.