by Lily Pond
“I think you’ve got it all backwards!” I now heard him exclaiming. “Sometimes it’s no more than merely calling the rain a drought-management device and taking credit for it. Image control. He who controls the language controls the world!”
“She!” she responded, and they both guffawed.
When they stopped laughing, my husband yelled, “Hey, Grace. Get in here!” Then to Julia Child, “She’s got a great story to tell, illustrate this whole thing.” Then to me, “Come on in here, honey.”
I didn’t want to go. I was enjoying having my hands to the elbow in warm water, making everything clean again. Sometimes I thought the best part of a dinner party was restoring order afterwards. Still, I brushed my hair off my forehead with the back of my arm, succeeding only in dampening it when it fell again after a moment, and I made my reappearance in the dining room.
For some reason I looked first at Ted. His eyes were down and he was still smiling.
Howard grabbed for my hand, “Tell ’em honey. Tell them your fishing story.”
“Well, it’s not really a fishing story. Not really.”
“I know. You know the one I mean—go on—tell them.”
I looked helplessly at Julia Child and again at Ted. He seemed so much younger than her. What did he do? Something to do with trains, was it? “Ok. I’ll see if I can remember it. …
“A father and his son were fishing in a big lake …” I wished Ted would look at me. “… and it was Father’s Day. The son had always given his father a gift from the standard repertoire of Father’s Day presents: cuff links, a funny mug, or, most usually, a tie. The father had always hoped for something more individual so, over the last year, he had taken special pains to get closer to the boy, hoping to reveal himself as a person to his son rather than just a figurehead.
“As a special treat, for Father’s Day this year, he arranged to take his son to the lake, and here they were, on the holiday at last, in the boat, in the water, and it was at this moment the son presented his father with this year’s gift: and it was a tie.
“The father was somewhat shocked and truly saddened. The son noticed this on his face and asked his father what was the matter. ‘After this whole year,’ he answered, ‘I’d truly hoped for a gift that reflected the human being you’d come to know me to be. But this,’ he held it up, ‘this is just another tie.’
“‘Don’t look at it as just another tie, Dad,’ the son answered. ‘Look at it as continuity between the past and the future.’”
At this Howard tugged at my apron and cried, “Yes! Yes! That’s exactly it! Who shall control the atlas shall run the ship!!” He and Julia Child began talking a mile a minute again and I escaped back into the kitchen. Ted followed a few moments later, silently, with another armload of dishes. This time he put them down carefully beside the sink, but managed to brush the back of my arm with his elbow. I looked up at him quickly but all I could see was his smile.
When they had finally left, Howard got around to his evening paper. I swept the crumbs from the cloth, then neatly folded it for the hamper. I was just looking around the kitchen to see that there was no more to be done when Howard called to me from the bedroom.
“Do you think I’m getting too fat?”
I went in, and we both examined him in the mirror. “You know I like you like that,” I said.
“Like that,” he mimicked, and frowned at himself in the mirror, running his hand up and down the tightly curled, greying hair on his abdomen I liked so much. “You think she liked me?”
“Who?” Julia Child?, I was thinking.
“Bettina.”
“What do you care? I thought you didn’t like her.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He rolled his eyes upwards and went to sit on the side of the bed. “She’s getting a lot of prestige in the department since her book came out, you know.” He grimaced again. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
“I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m not that kind of psychologist.”
“Well, I think she liked me. You coming to bed, or what?”
“Give me a chance, dear . . …”
I went into the bathroom to disrobe. I was very aware of the texture of the fabrics as they slid past my skin, and was surprised to feel they were a little damp, through and through. Well, I’d been in hot water the last half an hour, I thought. That made sense.
That night I dreamed that the phone was ringing. When I answered it, somehow whoever was at the other end touched me.
Bettina threw a holiday party. I hate parties; I prefer entertaining to being entertained. Howard said we had to go. The Department Head would be there, along with a couple of “young hotshots” who were trying to get into the department. Being entertaining was somehow required of linguists, and I could almost see Howard mentally rehearsing his string of anecdotes.
I could also see him visibly relax when he found the other men at the party dressed to the tweed level and no further. It was such a balancing act, being clever and entertaining but never more so than your superiors, scouring the literature for linguistics-related topics for discussion, but carefully leaving the best topics for someone above you should they want them. Something must be brewing, I thought. Howard had even trimmed his nose hairs for this one.
Ted met us at the door. Bettina was in the center of the room, surrounded by listeners, her dark hair piled at the top of her head, rich and lustrous. Ted took Howard’s coat, waved him in. Then when he took my coat, I felt him lean into me from behind, just for a moment, but clear, definite. Then he took both coats and disappeared down the hallway.
I had less to share with linguists than you might think. While they combed form in search of content, we combed content in search of form. Ids and superegos we left for more tolerant fellows; we sorted through the mess to bring forth the clean, shining structure beneath, turning a sorrowful individual into a perfect graph, a chart of meaning. From that, miracles could be worked.
I found a comfortable seat on a beige brocaded couch with plush pillows. Curiously, I found that my nipples felt a little tender. I was calculating what part of my cycle I must be in when Ted came by with a tray of hors d’œuvres. As he walked past me on the couch, the front of his legs brushed the front of mine. He didn’t meet my eyes, just held out the tray and kept smiling. I looked up at him. He was nice-looking in a soft kind of way, like Art Garfunkle compared to Paul Simon. I took a tiny quiche and held it on a cocktail napkin. I watched as he moved on, offering the tray to only a couple of people before returning back into the kitchen. He didn’t come back out again. I know, because I kept watching the kitchen door.
Finally the party was over. I suppose I had had a couple of champagne punches—Howard was the one on sparkling water tonight—but still I could insist that when Ted helped me back on with my coat he breathed warmly into my neck and whispered, barely audibly, “Sometime.”
“I’m such an idiot,” Howard said in the car on the way home. “I don’t think I uttered a single honest word this entire evening. What kind of life is this?” He shook his head and I could hear his stomach growl.
“Did you eat anything?”
“I was too rattled. …”
“I’ll get you something when we get home. You’ll feel better.”
As we sat around the warmly lit kitchen table, I was aware of the comfort of being home, but Howard was still rattling on.
“… But you have to, don’t you see. If I, god forbid, should ever say, ‘I want that job because I’m better than so-and-so—he was my student, for god’s sakes,’ they’d think I was an idiot.” He waved his arms around in the air. “So it’s posture this and posture that, and with linguists! It’s constant ‘you know what he was doing with that statement . …’
“Did you hear what Bettina said? She made a point of telling me George was having his book published by Random House. Random House! Didn’t I have my book published by Random House?”
“I thought it was Crown.”
&
nbsp; “Crown, Random House, it’s the same thing. But no, Random House just sounds more prestigious. She did that very deliberately.”
“Maybe she was just telling you. Maybe she thought you’d want to know. Why do you always assume the worst?”
“But what if I’m right? What does it mean
“Why do you let these things bother you so much?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He sighed. “You tell me.”
“But …” I started to say, but didn’t.
He pushed his emptied plate away. “I’m sorry, honey.” He looked up at me. “I’m being so self-absorbed. What about you? You have a good time?”
“Oh sure. I had a great time,” I told him.
“It was a good party. …” he said.
“It was a good party.” I got up and gathered up the plates to do the dishes.
That night, the telephone was ringing again. When I finally answered it, it was Ted. He came through the phone lines and touched me everywhere on my body, like sweat, or a small cloud, blowing along at ground level, coming right in your direction and you can’t get out of the way.
That’s when the phone calls began—the actual ones, not the ones in my dreams. Every few days the phone would ring once, and then stop. If Howard or I happened to be sitting right next to it and picked it up, they would hang up, just the one ring and the click.
This went on for a few weeks, not every day, but often enough that we discussed getting an unlisted number. Howard was convinced it was students harassing him for giving out bad grades. I wasn’t so sure.
One afternoon I waited until the phone had rung four times before I answered. I couldn’t have been more surprised. It was Bettina, inviting me to tea.
When I got to her house, I was glad to find the lights all lit as the day had turned grey. She welcomed me into her kitchen, and we sat in a dining nook that overlooked the garden. Her hair was down, brushing her shoulders in a kind of page boy, and she brought tea crackers and Russian crescent sugar cookies on plates with different flowers, lilies, passion flowers, and butterflies on each one.
“What pretty plates,” I complimented her.
“Port Meiron,” she said. “Macy’s.”
The teakettle whistled. Bettina got up and poured the steaming water into the pot, tucked the pot into a rooster-shaped cozy, brought it to the table and sat back down.
“So glad you could come,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to say a word to you at the party.”
I smiled. “These are my favorite cookies.”
“Mine too!” she hooted, then began to pour the tea. “I hope Earl Grey is okay.”
“It’s my favorite,” I said, “for the afternoon.”
“And English Breakfast in the morning?”
“Yes! With cream in both.”
“Yes!” We both seemed disproportionately delighted to find these things in common.
We sat in silence for a moment, sipping our tea and eating our cookies carefully so the powdered sugar would drop only on our napkins. It began to drizzle. This seemed to complete the sense of coziness the tea and cookies, the warm, lit nook lent. I watched water gather then drop gently from the lip of a large pink rose just outside the window.
After a moment, Bettina said, “Your husband is a great asset to our department, as I’m sure you know.”
“Thank you, yes. I’ll be sure to tell him you said so.” Bettina seemed to be reverting to a very slight German accent as she relaxed. I hadn’t noticed it before. Perhaps she came from a German-speaking home. I made a mental note to ask Howard about it, but then added a question mark in parenthesis to my note. Of course, I had to tell him I had come here—Bettina may say something herself. But I was reluctant without knowing why.
“We like to get to know the families of the people in our department.”
I smiled again.
“You’re in the psychology department?”
“Testing. Yes. It’s one of the branches.”
“I have always found psychology so interesting.” She said “haff” instead of “have.” “It’s so closely related to our field, you know.”
“Yes, there do seem to be similarities.”
“I think psychology became liberated in the 1960s. Before then it was a dirty little secret, and after that it was a way of life …”
“It does seem to have changed,” I agreed.
“… Communication. That’s what it’s about, yes? Both of our fields.”
“… Well, in a way …” She was confusing the kind of psychologist I was too. The word “psychologist” seems to create a very singular picture in people’s minds.
“Fascinating.”
I smiled. We sipped our tea. There is probably nothing more perfect than Earl Grey with cream on a rainy afternoon, unless it’s Earl Grey with cream and a Russian crescent sugar cookie.
“Sex too,” she announced.
“Excuse me?”
“Sex came out of hiding. For our parent’s generation it was so taboo. But our generation talked of nothing else!”
I laughed, slightly. I couldn’t imagine where this conversation was going.
“Someone should do a dissertation,” she said, more matter-of-factly. “I know just the student,” she said to herself, then to me, “The Linguistics of Sex. What do you think?”
“It sounds very interesting,” I said. Now I could see her making a mental note. Then she turned her attention to me again.
“But it stays a mystery nevertheless.”
“Yes, a mystery.” I wiped a speck of powdered sugar from the corner of my mouth.
“Between a man and a woman, yes? Still a mystery.”
I nodded, watching her carefully. now. She sucked in very slightly on both her lips for a moment. “In a marriage, for example,” she said, trying to sound intellectually removed. “Between a husband and wife, you might say …”
“Yes …” I encouraged.
“Communication. …”
“Yes. …”
“Isss not always easy.”
“No.”
“One might try …”
I nodded.
“… for example …”
“Yes …”
“Direct communication …”
“Yes …”
“I want this here. …”
“Yes.”
“Or that there. …”
“Uh-huh …”
“Very specific, you understand …”
“Very specific.”
“Very clear.” She looked at me directly.
“Clear, yes.”
“And still they might seem to not understand at all.”
“Not at all.” I nodded.
She breathed a deep sigh, leaned back, and sipped her tea. “More hot?”
I shook my head.
When I think back on what she said next, I hear, “You vill go now, yess?”—in her Julia Child voice with her German accent, but of course she didn’t really say it that way. She had merely made some comments about having to think about dinner, or some such thing, and I did the same, and then I was back in my coat and gloves with my umbrella and out the door. But not before I noticed a check from Amtrack addressed to Theodore Robbins sitting on a little silver tray in their front hall. And above it a silver-framed photo of Ted and Bettina, heads leaned together, hands joined in holy matrimony.
I got back in my car and started the engine, then sat for a moment and listened to the rain on the car’s metal roof. I was glad it wasn’t too cold. The dampness had me near to shivering anyway. Theodore, I thought.
I backed the car slowly out of the drive and down onto the street. Rather than making the left to our house at the main road, I took the right which would lead me to the arterial which would take me to the next town. It was a long drive in the rain. People had begun to turn on their headlights. The station was in an older part of town. I might never go there if it were not for the train.
When I got there it had stopped rai
ning, but was very muggy. I could feel the silk sticking to my skin under my clothing. I parked my car at the back of the lot and walked the length of it up to the station house. It began to rain again before I got there.
I saw Ted as soon as I made it inside. He was at the main desk checking over someone’s forms. I waited until he looked up, saw me, and came over. I met his eyes. “Theodore,” I said.
He lowered his head and said, “Grace.”
I looked down at my clothes, leaned forward and said to him, “I am so wet.”
Without raising his head, he smiled. He reached out and took my hand, and led me upstairs to the dark.
Her Morning as the Hibernating Arctic Ground Squirrel
Molly Tenenbaum
His blind language, soft, like a nose.
Once,
and again.
Nothing was touching her leg, now something is.
What will be asked of her? Can’t just keep sleeping—
if a blind part of her own could answer,
breathe and rise, breathe and rise—
Always she wakes up too much and too early.
Warm as pocket-warm paper, wool tucked in under
the toes, up the length of the leg, long. the length of the
arm,
no cold air, no gapping edges.
Something is going to be asked of her.
How could it, asleep, is he,
not, does he know
he presses her lèg, touching, touching.
Of the elements here, anything might be made.
The white room, the cold in long
swags from the corners,
their ruffles of breath at the center.
She can if she wants be the squirrel they saw in Science News, asleep in the snow—they were asking, How can the brain come back from such cold?
Blood down to three beats a minute.
Only a circle of white-spotted fur
showed,
brown hairs matching the hairline
brown cracks in the snow.
She’d like to stay, flakes falling inside her, stay here,