“No, he wasn’t a bad husband,” Diane said.
“He loves you,” Selena said, accusing without really meaning to.
“I know that,” Diane said.
“Well,” Selena said indignantly. “Is love so easy to come by?” It hurt her to say this.
“Love,” Diane said, gently, and gave a little laugh, dismissing it, then sobering slowly. Selena grasped her coffee cup more tightly with both hands, to stop them trembling.
“I haven’t forgotten when you thought you couldn’t live without him,” she said.
“Ahhh,” Diane said, remembering. “Well, it turns out that I can live without him after all.” Her voice thickened, seemingly drawn from some deeper part of herself that was constant and strong. “I won’t depend on anyone for my life.”
“Your …” Selena began. She had been going to say ‘life?’ or maybe ‘children?’ Diane went on as though she hadn’t spoken.
“Selena,” she said, turning her dark, deep eyes on her sister. “Marriage is wrong. It has nothing to do with love. It’s a fraud. It takes you and turns you into a fake, into a …”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m only a servant,” Selena said. She was amazed at what she had said, amazed at the bitterness she could hear in her own voice. Anger swelled up inside her, she felt like she was choking, but she pushed the words down. The worst of it was that she was not angry with Diane now, but with things she didn’t dare articulate. Rhea turned away from the window in a slow, dignified movement, till she was looking directly at Selena, her eyes piercing through the circle of shadow around her face. Selena felt herself caught in Rhea’s gaze. She made a little noise, a tiny throat-clearing, or perhaps a whimper.
“Can’t you even imagine yourself a single, free individual—a soul out there in the universe?” Diane asked. There was a silence as Selena tried to understand this.
“You’re a mother!” she said, appalled.
“Men do,” Diane said, evenly, ignoring Selena’s accusatory tone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Selena said. Emotions tumbled inside her—anger, sorrow, a desire to be left alone so she could think. Phoebe’s eyes, as she looked at Diane, had a new, speculative look in them. Rhea was looking out the window again, at the blazing blue of the winter sky, at the brilliance of sun striking snow. How can she look at that brightness without shading her eyes? Selena wondered, and then remembered, her eyesight is fading, she’s an old woman, she’ll die soon. And then, Phoebe has spoken at last.
“Men,” she said. “Men do a lot of things.” Involuntarily her eyes sought out Phoebe’s rounded stomach under her smock. Why did Phoebe persist in wearing white? As if she were a bride? A pregnant, virgin bride. She shook her head at this, confused. All of them were pregnant here, Diane with possibility, Phoebe with a child, Selena with the weight of her own unborn and incomprehensible life, Rhea with her death. A chill struck her, and she clasped her coffee cup more tightly to warm her hands—soon I’ll die myself, before I know it—before I’ve lived.
“Oh, Diana, Diana,” she whispered, returning to Diana’s christened name, which they had abandoned long ago in childhood. “You’re a woman. A woman, not a man. You can never be a man.”
“Who’d want to be?” Diana asked, and Rhea chuckled. Diana looked at Phoebe again. Why did they all seem to be talking to Phoebe? “I like being a woman more and more,” Diana said. “I am a woman.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Selena said helplessly. It was all too much for her, and she felt angry with herself because she could only respond to Diana like a child, she who was the older sister, who had raised Diana, been a mother to her. “Say something I can understand,” she pleaded. “Tell me why you left Tony,”
Diana swung her foot back and forth, looked down into her lap, then across the way to where Rhea sat in front of the window, a large, dark shape against the light.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she said, suddenly gay. “When I first went to the city, Tony and the kids and I used to go for walks along the riverbank when the weather was still nice. Sometimes we’d go into the downtown area and stroll along the streets and into that big downtown mall. Everywhere we looked, we saw people. All sizes, all shapes, all ages, all kinds. People in wheelchairs or on crutches or in baby carriages—or striding along with their heads held high, or running, or staggering. Once I saw a woman walking down the busy, main street of the city sobbing out loud, tears pouring down her cheeks. Another time I saw a Chinese man and a thin, dark-haired white woman walking down the street side by side. She was yelling at him, bawling him out and calling him names, telling the story of their lives together. He didn’t run away or even walk faster. He just kept walking, his expression flat, never saying a word to her. One time I saw a policeman arresting a teenage shoplifter in the mall. She was struggling to get away from him, screaming and cursing at him. Would you believe it? And I could tell she loved having everybody stare at her. You see all kinds of things in the mall. Women preening in front of plate-glass mirrors, a lost child crying, prostitutes fighting, small Asian immigrants strolling in clusters, looking lost and sad.”
She paused, swinging her foot again, the one leg crossed over the other.
“At night I go to class at the university …” Selena wanted to say, and who looks after your children? but held her tongue. “One night I was walking to work from the bus stop. It was midnight, and I was so tired. My eyes were blurring, I couldn’t even see right, and my mind wouldn’t work, you know? I would look at things, but I couldn’t see what they were. I mean, I could see the cars and the signs on the stores—the words—but I couldn’t figure out what they meant. I was stumbling down this city street in the night, with all these … things … around me, and they didn’t make any sense at all.
“I knew my kids were at home in bed, that my husband was with them, I could see them, but I couldn’t understand what they were. I couldn’t understand how they could be my children. I couldn’t understand anything anymore.”
Selena listened, fascinated, appalled, afraid to speak. Diana wasn’t looking at any of them now. It was as though she were explaining to herself.
“Suddenly everything seemed different. I can’t tell you how, but it was as if I could see the world the way it really is—without love and hate and all that wanting … I could see the people, just creatures, you know, just bodies that moved and were warm or cold, that laughed or cried …”
She uncrossed her legs and sat forward, her elbows resting on her red skirt, her chin resting on her fists.
“I thought of Mom, Selena, what I can remember of her dying. I remembered all of it. I remembered things I didn’t even know I knew. Her lying in that bed, day after day, so thin, white-skinned, her eyes sinking deeper and deeper into herself, withdrawing from us slowly. I thought how … we all … die.” Here she laughed a small embarrassed laugh and looked down to her lap. “You remember how she died.”
“I remember,” Selena said, although she never, never thought about it. Both Phoebe and Rhea were motionless.
“At night class I was studying Shakespeare—Hamlet—we took it in high school, but I never paid any attention. It didn’t mean anything to me then. But this time I understood, really understood. Ophelia especially.”
Selena couldn’t remember who Ophelia was. Was she the one who drowned? Floating down the river singing that crazy song? The one all the boys had laughed at? Selena remembered blushing over that, as if she were the one floating down the stream singing that nutty song.
“So you see,” Diana said, straightening, putting her arms down by her sides, looking across the room at her sister, “so you see I could hardly go on the same way I always had, after that, could I?”
Suddenly Rhea laughed, that long, ridiculous laugh, and abruptly Diana joined in with her, laughing and laughing.
They were thirteen for Christmas dinner, fewer than usual, but enough to support the weight of the occasion wit
h noise and laughter. Kent sat at one end of the table, Selena at the other, with Rhea on her right. Diana, her children on each side of her and then Tony, Mark, Jason, and Phoebe, Gus, Rhoda, and Sandy, were spread down the sides. They had moved the table into the living room, where there was more room, put another, smaller one against it, then covered them both with a big tablecloth so that the join was barely visible. Then they had set it with Selena’s best china and silver that had been Diana and Selena’s grandmother’s, decorated it with unlit candles in glass holders sitting inside plastic wreaths of holly, and laid a big, bright paper napkin with red poinsettias beside each place setting. A sprig of mistletoe hung in the doorway between the hall and the living room and everybody had been duly kissed and teased under it. Selena looked up and down each side of the table as Kent carved the turkey. It seemed to her that she had much to be grateful for, more than the quick grace Mark had mumbled could ever express.
After Rhea, the children were served first, from the youngest to the oldest. Diana bent to cut Cathy’s turkey for her, and to spoon a little cranberry jelly onto it. When she had finished, Cathy reached for her glass of milk. Diana held it to Cathy’s lips while Cathy got a firmer grip on the glass. Her hand remained around it as Cathy drank, she seemed oblivious to the loud conversations around her, to the passing of bowls and platters and the clink of cutlery against china. As Cathy drank, Diana’s lips moved. In that second, she was pure, a mother.
Selena found herself thinking that her own children were grown now, that those moments were gone forever for her, and she regretted their loss. Something gone out of her life, something for which there was no substitute. Diana had turned away, to Tammy on her other side, and Selena could no longer see her face as she bent, her lustrous hair falling forward over her shoulders.
Across the table, Sandy, a fifty-year-old woman who didn’t look more than thirty-five, served herself from the bowl of carrots and peas that Selena had canned in the fall. Sandy, whose home was a big house in the city, full of people like herself who couldn’t manage on their own in the world. Taken by her parents when she was fifteen to an institution and left there, then moved out of it into a group home. Allowed to go home only for the occasional holiday. She felt sorry for Sandy, who would never have her own house or children. She had been sterilized when she was a teenager. It’s better that way, they had all agreed.
And there was Phoebe, next to her, pregnant, silent, but at this moment not seeming unhappy as she spooned a little gravy onto her potatoes, then passed the dish to Mark beside her. Her inexplicable words earlier that day. And across from Mark, Tony, whose beloved, beautiful wife had rejected him.
Here we are, a family, Selena thought. For the first time she saw them as something more than relatives who knew each other from birth. She saw that they were bound by invisible bonds of pain and sorrow and joy, not just by blood and accidents of birth. Rhoda, approaching menopause, Gus with what Selena privately thought of as a ‘mean streak.’ All families are like this, she thought. This is what a family is.
“God, before we know it, it’ll be January calf sales,” Kent remarked.
“Don’t think about work,” Selena said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Kent said.
Gus said, “The way things are going, it’s hard to think about anything else.”
“I heard in town that Whitelaw had to sell all his two-year-old steers. He’s back in the cow-calf business, like the rest of us,” Kent said.
“And you’re gonna keep your land,” Gus Said to Tony, shaking his head.
“Well, I see you and Kent are keeping yours,” Tony pointed out, grinning.
“Have to,” Kent said. “If I sell now by the time the bank got through with me, there wouldn’t be anything left. I guess I’ll stick it out to the bitter end.”
“Have some more turkey,” Selena said to Gus, who took the platter from her.
On her right, Rhea ate heartily. Rhea’s appetite was a mystery to all of them, she could eat rings around any of them, a family of hearty eaters. Where does she put it all? Selena wondered for the hundredth time. Old people are supposed to have small appetites and all kinds of digestive troubles, but not Rhea. Thinking of this, she felt her mood lighten again, and she jumped up to refill the empty dressing bowl.
Late in the evening Gus, Rhoda and Sandy left, and Mark and Jason went upstairs to bed. Tony and Kent had retired to the living room and were dozing in front of the television set, and the little girls had long since fallen asleep on the rug and been put to bed. Selena, Phoebe, Diana and Rhea were sitting in the kitchen. It was almost midnight.
“Do you want me to drive you home, Rhea?” Selena asked. “I didn’t realize how late it is.”
“I’m staying here tonight,” Rhea said. Irritated, Selena held her tongue. And where will she sleep? she wondered.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Rhea said, as if Selena had spoken aloud. Selena glanced up at Rhea, noticed that the skin of her plump cheeks and her neck looked white in the bright light, fragile, and was stricken with guilt because Rhea was an old woman after all, and would be alone in her own house.
“Good,” she said. “You’ll be here to say good-bye to Diana and kids tomorrow.” Rhea, unexpectedly, sighed. A long sigh, filled with something like sadness. It made Selena wonder if she was all right.
Diana said, “I don’t know if this is the best time to tell you or not.” They stared at her. Apprehension grew in Selena.
“What?” she asked, her voice low and tense.
“What I have to do,” Diana said, not looking at her. There was a silence around the table.
“Honestly, Diana,” Selena said. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” Phoebe, who had been leaning sleepily in her chair, her head touching the wall, straightened, and put her arms on the table in front of her. In the living room, somebody was snoring.
“I’ve decided to leave the girls here,” Diana said. For a moment, Selena couldn’t understand what she meant.
“You mean, with us?” she asked slowly.
“No.”
“What?” Selena asked, still calm. “You know I’d be glad to look after them till you get more settled.”
“I’m leaving them with Tony,” Diana said. Rhea stirred, lifting her head, as if her neck were stiff, then lowering it again. If she laughs, Selena thought, I’m going to hit her.
“For … how long?” Selena asked. She could hear the fear in her voice.
“Until they’re grown,” Diana said, lifting her eyes so that they met Selena’s. Selena stared at her, aghast, hardly believing what she had heard.
“You don’t mean it,” Selena said, after a second. Diana’s eyelids fluttered as if Selena had struck her. “You’re going to abandon your own children? Have you gone era—”
“I am not abandoning them,” Diana said. Her voice was very quiet, yet firm. “I’m leaving them with their father.” Selena opened her mouth to shout, but thought better of it and tried to control herself.
“Why?” she asked finally.
“Because …” Diana began, looking over Selena’s head. “Because—it’s too hard. I can’t do it.” Her voice wavered at this, ever so slightly.
“Do what?”
“I can’t work out this thing I’m doing, and raise two children at the same time. It’s too hard, I never get any sleep. I’m not there when they want me to be. I can’t be there … and do this … thing, too. I …” She grew silent and drew in a long, quavering breath.
Selena sat and stared at her, pity, anger, horror, all churning inside her.
“Rhea?” she asked. The kitchen was so quiet, you could hear the air in the room. Selena began to feel her heart thumping in her chest. Squeeze, relax, squeeze, relax. She could actually feel her own heart. It frightened her. She could hardly breathe she was so frightened by the beating of her own heart.
“Rhea …” she gasped. Rhea was staring across the room … to the small frosted window at the top o
f the door leading outside, staring at that small, frozen square of night, while Selena sat and felt her heart squeeze, and relax, squeeze, and relax, inside her cage of bones. She thought she might faint.
“Ah, Selena,” Rhea said, finally. Selena was startled because Rhea had chosen to speak to her and not to Diana. “What am I going to do with you?” Her voice was gentle; suddenly Selena heard echoes of her mother’s voice in that sound. It seemed to her that her mother was speaking to her and she grew confused, looking rapidly from one woman to the other, for was she not Phoebe’s mother? But Phoebe was a mother now. And was Diana not her sister? But she had mothered her—did that not make Diana her daughter? Who was mother here? Who was daughter? Who was sister?
She began to gasp, and Diana rose and went to her, stood behind her, and massaged Selena’s shoulders and neck with her long, narrow hands.
“Calm down, Selena,” she said. “Calm down. You’re just … tired, worn out with all this Christmas work …” Slowly the panic that had swept over Selena began to dissipate under the gentle touch of her sister’s hands.
“I don’t understand,” she said at last, putting up one hand to touch Diana’s.
“I know,” Diana said. “I know that. But my little girls will grow up anyway. With or without me. Tony will take care of them. He loves them. He wants to devote his life to them.” All the while Phoebe watched Diana with wonder in her eyes.
“You’ll come back sometimes and see them?” Selena asked.
“Of course,” Diana said. “Often, and I’ll take them now and then with me. They will always be my children.” She said this gently, her voice breaking at the last. She took her hands away from Selena’s shoulders and went back to where she had been sitting. She took a deep breath and said, “I’m going to go with Tony back to the old house tonight. I’m going to tell him.” She looked at each of them as if she had nothing but questions. They stared back at her, each in her own way: wonder, despair, acceptance. Then Diana burst into tears.
She put her head on her hands, bending forward from her waist as she sat on the kitchen chair, her long hair falling around her hands, and sobbed as if her heart were breaking. She cried and cried and cried. While Phoebe, Selena, and Rhea watched her, not moving from their places.
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