“What just happened?” Dudley asked. “What did I say?”
His brother and parents didn’t answer. They regarded Dudley half-wistfully, and with a great collective distance in their eyes, as if the table were a ship and Dudley were leaning over the railing, waving his goodbyes.
EXCEPT DUDLEY DIDN’T say goodbye and never would. The next Thanksgiving was peaceful—Susan didn’t mention her family traditions or Fort Wayne, and Penelope complimented her on her smile, and Susan said that she’d never even had braces as a child, and the two of them expressed their reservations about orthodontia as a practice and orthodontists as practitioners—and by the next Thanksgiving, Susan and Dudley were engaged to be married. Dudley announced that he had a job waiting for him at Procter & Gamble after graduation, and so, as a married couple, they would settle in Cincinnati, in the same neighborhood. The dinner was more celebratory than normal: Mr. Murray was triumphant and oratorical (he was in rehearsal to play Abraham Lincoln in a one-man play called Abraham Lincoln, and as such, he often spoke as though he were addressing the nation) as he praised his wife and her beauty and proclaimed, “Because a divorce is that which I will not give!” in a way that suggested such moments were inevitable and easily overcome in an otherwise long and happy married life. Mrs. Murray grimaced her way through this story but at least didn’t get up from her seat during its telling, and Winslow actually let slip some of his detachment and gave his brother a half hug in congratulations. But the good feeling was short-lived; when Dudley asked him to be his best man, Winslow said, “That is an excellent idea,” and then the two of them argued over what that was supposed to mean, exactly.
Meanwhile, the women were in the kitchen. They opened another bottle of wine, and while they drank it, Susan asked, “I’m curious . . .” and here she paused, and Penelope feared she was going to call Mrs. Murray “Mom,” but she didn’t. “Mrs. Murray,” Susan said, “why did you want that divorce so badly, anyway?”
“Because I noticed one day that he looked exactly like Warren G. Harding,” Mrs. Murray said, without hesitation, “and I didn’t think I wanted to be married to a man who looked like Warren G. Harding.”
Penelope laughed: she could see Mr. Murray through the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, and he did look exactly like Warren G. Harding (whom she had learned all about in grade school, along with the other Ohioan presidents). She laughed and laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop, and her laughter then took on a disturbing, breathless quality that was closer to weeping than laughing, and then she stopped laughing altogether and started crying, right there in the kitchen, into her glass of wine. Because Penelope realized that she had never asked her mother why she had wanted to divorce her father, or why her mother had needed her father to give it her a divorce, why she didn’t just go out and get the divorce without her father’s permission; she was twenty-five years old, and it had never once occurred to her to ask these questions. What kind of daughter had she been all these years? And what kind of daughter was she now? Because she still didn’t want to know why her mother had wanted what she wanted. She did not want to know, and if her mother started to tell her she would run right out the door and get on the next plane to Provo and never come back. No, all Penelope wanted was to cry, to cry and her mother to hug her and not ask why she was crying. Which is exactly what Mrs. Murray did.
As for Susan, she had no idea who Warren G. Harding was, or why he might make her slightly tetched future sister-in-law laugh, then cry. But she did know that her husband looked like a younger version of Mr. Murray, and if Mr. Murray looked exactly like Warren G. Harding, then so would her Dudley, and what, exactly, was so funny or sad about that?
IT SHOULD BE said that Winslow and Dudley never wondered why their mother wanted a divorce, either. Like Penelope, they remembered those long-ago months when their mother threw those books and wore those ties and howled that howl, and of course that had scared them, and of course they were happier once she stopped doing those things and instead told stories about them once a year. Because the more often the stories were told, the less often the children remembered that there might be anything behind the stories, until finally they were just stories, stories they told and listened to once a year, and that was all. And what was wrong with that? Was it so awful that they never asked why the divorces were being requested, and why they weren’t given? After all, why the monkey in Monkey Night? What genetic map gives a family such talented tongues, and on what occasion did they first discover such talent? What is the history behind the cannons, and where, oh where, does one get the miniature balls to fire from them? If we asked and answered such questions about our families, would we still want them to be our families? If we asked and answered such questions, would our families even allow us to be in the family anymore? And if we weren’t in a family anymore, then in what would we be?
AFTER CRYING IN her mother’s arms, Penelope decided that she’d been away long enough. She moved back to Cincinnati, took a job in a large dental practice, and married Tim Walley, the oldest, most placid dentist there, the one who was never perturbed by his patients—not by their excessive bleeding or screaming, or their stubborn tartar buildup, or their lack or insurance coverage, or anything. Like Susan, Tim didn’t seem at all bothered by the family’s famous story, and Mr. and Mrs. Murray were grateful for him, grateful that he had rescued their daughter from being one of those blandly pretty women who never marry and people can never understand why. As they got older, Mr. and Mrs. Murray confused their chronology and often thought of Tim as the heroic dentist who had brought their Penelope back from Utah, and not just the dentist who happened to hire and then marry her back here in Cincinnati. When Tim was unable to answer their questions about what Provo was like, they thought he was just trying to spare them the details of their daughter’s sad, lonely Utah life. They were grateful for that, too.
And then there was Winslow, who became the black sheep the Murrays had always known he’d become. After high school and college (first Ohio State, then a series of lesser state schools, until finally graduating from the least of them), he grew several beards and shaved them; rented a thousand apartments and lost a thousand security deposits; wrecked one car while driving sober and none while not; and failed the Ohio public education certification test by a wide margin, then passed it, just barely, before deciding not to search for a job that might require such certification. Instead, he moved—to New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Michigan, then New Jersey again. He always came home for Thanksgiving—not so much because he loved and missed the family, but because he wasn’t sure he wanted to be totally without one—and each time he went back to whatever state in which he resided at the time, the Murrays wondered if he would return for the next Thanksgiving. But Winslow always came back.
He always came back alone, until one Thanksgiving, when he was twenty-eight, he came back with a woman whom he had married, married without the Murrays knowing a thing about it. Her name was Ilsa. She was beautiful, and the Murrays, once they got over the surprise of her existence as their daughter- and sister-in-law, recognized that: she had lovely jet-black hair, and feet pointing slightly out, as if she had once been a dancer. Ilsa was friendly enough, too: she laughed when laughter was called for, and listened to the famous story without undue participation or judgment. But there was something about her that made the family uneasy. For one, Winslow, who had always been so private and detached, began to tell them things about Ilsa that he shouldn’t, things they didn’t much want to hear: the way Ilsa shaved her shins but not her thighs, and how soft that thigh hair felt when he ran his fingers over it; about the state-shaped moles (South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Oklahoma) on her back, and the precancer therein that the doctor had warned her to be vigilant about; the way her left armpit sweated when she was nervous, but not, mysteriously, the right one.
And then there was her name. The Murrays didn’t know much about Winslow, but they did know that he was perverse, and th
ey wondered whether Winslow would have fallen for her the way he had if Ilsa’s last name had matched her first—if it were Johansson or Bergman or some such obviously Swedish surname. But Ilsa’s last name wasn’t Johansson; it was Zilkowski, Ilsa Zilkowski. And when Winslow told them that he loved her very, very much, they wondered if that didn’t have something to do with the perversity of her name.
Finally, there was the matter of divorce. Ilsa was from a family of divorce: there were more divorces than not in her family, and her parents themselves had been divorced and remarried and divorced so many times that occasionally Ilsa had difficulty remembering who her biological parents were. She seemed amazed, after hearing the famous story, that no one in their family had ever been divorced. “Tell me the truth,” Ilsa said. “Not anyone?”
They assured her that no one ever had.
“How is that possible?” Ilsa wanted to know.
This seemed to them an ominous question, and when Ilsa and Winslow returned to Jersey City, where they had met, gotten married, and now lived, Dudley predicted, “They’ll be divorced in a year, tops.” No one disagreed with him.
But he and they were wrong. Winslow and Ilsa returned the next Thanksgiving, full of news: they were going to move to Cincinnati, and Winslow was going to put his state certification to use and get a job teaching high school English, and they were going to start a family. In fact, they had already started one: Ilsa was pregnant.
“But why?” Mrs. Murray asked them. “Why are you going to move here?”
“Because we want to be around family,” Winslow said. This was somewhat true: Ilsa wanted to be around family, and he loved her and wanted to give her what she wanted. Winslow was lucky enough to have a family he could give her.
“I’ve never really had a family before,” Ilsa explained.
What could you say to something like that if you were a Murray? They all knew how the rest of the night would go. After Thanksgiving dinner, they would tell an especially long, complicated version of their famous story in honor of their prodigal brother and son and his pregnant wife, and at the end of their famous story they would rise as one and shout out, “Because a divorce is that which I will not give!” as if shouting it for all Thanksgivings past, and all Thanksgivings yet to come. Then Mrs. Murray would say, “It’s getting late,” and they would go upstairs to bed and count their blessings, as happy-and-whole families always do, thankful that they, like all families, had weathered some tough times, and that they, unlike most families, had their famous family story to help them weather, to help them forget, that which they had to weather. While they were upstairs, counting their blessings, Mrs. Murray would stay downstairs under the pretense of tidying up. Then, when she was certain that everyone had fallen asleep, Mrs. Murray would do what she always did, what she did on all Thanksgivings past and would do on all Thanksgivings yet to come: she would sneak into each bedroom and kiss each member of her brood—her husband, her children, and her children-in-law—gently on the forehead, then back out of the room and close the door behind her, as if she were saying her farewells, as if this were her last Thanksgiving and next year the family would tell a different story, a story about the Thanksgiving that Mrs. Murray had sneaked out in the middle of the night and left the Murrays and their marriages behind.
Cartoons
I ran into my ex-wife outside the community center. I mean this literally. I saw her before she saw me and then pretended I hadn’t seen her at all and knocked right into her, and the manila envelope she’d been holding fell to the ground, and then I picked it up and handed it back to her, making a big gentlemanly deal about the whole thing. It’d been eight years since we’d been married for twenty-two years, and I still hadn’t totally gotten over it yet.
“I always thought we’d grow old together,” I said.
“We did,” she said. “And now we’re growing even older with other people.”
It wounded me to hear her say this. Although of course it was true. By now we were remarried, to Allison and Robert, both good people, people with whom we were friends during our former life as a married couple. But whenever I saw my ex-wife, I couldn’t even remember their names.
“How’s Allison?” my ex-wife asked.
“What’s in the envelope?” I asked back.
“A cartoon,” she said. “I’m taking a cartoon-drawing class at the community center.”
“Hey, I did that,” I said. It was right after we’d divorced, when I was willing to do anything to forget everything, no matter how dull it was, no matter how bad I was at it. These were the cartoons I tended to draw: cartoons of people stuck in bad weather and making the best of it; birds kibitzing at the bird feeder; men coveting each other’s automobiles. The last cartoon I ever drew was of a group of men standing in front of a row of identical luxury vehicles, one man saying to the another, “I like yours better than mine, Don.”
“It’s really good,” everyone else in the class had said. “I think you should send it to the New Yorker.”
“I think I will,” I said.
We always told each other that our cartoons were really good, and that we should send them to the New Yorker. And we always said that we thought we would. But we never did.
“Can I see?” I asked my ex-wife, and then grabbed the envelope out of her hands before she could say no. I took the cartoon out of the envelope. In the cartoon, there was a building marked PLANNED PARENTHOOD. Attached to it was another building marked CAFÉ and DELI. There were tables and chairs in front of the buildings, and at one table sat a man and a woman. The man was holding what seemed to be a sandwich and was saying to the woman, “I know it looks like a hamburger, Doris. But it doesn’t taste like any hamburger I’ve ever eaten.”
I stared at the cartoon for a long time, trying to figure out what to say about it. Finally, my ex-wife must have taken my silence for confusion, because she said, “Meaning instead of a hamburger, it was a fetus.”
Then I looked up at her, and saw that her face was shining and wide-open and hopeful, and also not caring much whether I saw all those things on her face or not, and I fell in love with her a little again, still.
“It’s really good,” I said. “I think you should send it to the New Yorker.”
She nodded. “I already have,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it. “When?” I said. “How?”
But this reminded me of the end of a big argument we’d had at the end our marriage. “Are you really going to leave me?” I’d asked her.
“I already have,” she’d said.
I couldn’t believe it. “When?” I’d said. “How?” But what I’d thought was, Oh, I miss you so much, and I thought it now, too. But I didn’t say that. I just handed back her cartoon and walked into the community center. Since I’d taken that cartoon-drawing class, I’d taken a class in photography, and then a class in boatbuilding. Now I was taking a class in mapmaking and, in fact, was holding my own manila envelope. In it was a map I’d drawn of Portland, Maine, in 1921. This was what we did in mapmaking class: we drew maps of places that had already been mapped. All the maps had already been drawn, except we pretended that they hadn’t.
Children Who Divorce
Before they find Lisa in the river, before the doctor goes to prison, before any of what happens happens . . . it is just a normal pre-matinee August afternoon, and there we are, us five cast members in our costumes, sitting in the room next to the boiler, talking about our divorces; and there he is, the doctor, faraway in the eyes, not listening to us, thinking about something else.
“You’re not listening to us,” we tell him. “You’re thinking about something else.”
“I’m not,” he says, but he is. Maybe he’s thinking about the other casts he’s doctored. Maybe he’s thinking about the cast from three years ago, the cast of The Sound of Music: After Edelweiss, the kids who, after escaping the Nazis on film, grew up and became members of hate groups in real life, and who, backstage, after the curtain had dro
pped, kept asking the ushers and usherettes if there were any “mudpeople” in the audience. Maybe he’s thinking of the cast from two years ago, the cast of Where, Oh Where, Is Peter Pan? about Michael and John and Wendy, who onstage had stopped believing in Neverland and offstage had started believing in the needle drugs. Or maybe he’s thinking of last year’s cast, of No Longer Little Orphan Annie, six feet tall in her red Afro flecked with gray, addicted to child pornography. Maybe he’s thinking of her onstage, still singing about her hard-knock life, while after the show, backstage, she’s on her laptop computer, looking at we don’t want to know what. Maybe, if we’d been there, we’d be thinking about that, too. But we weren’t there, and we’re not that kind of cast with those kinds of problems: we were once the cast of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and now we’re the cast of Trouble at the Chocolate Factory: Strike! and in between, we all got married and then divorced, and now we want to talk about it—again, again—and we want the doctor to listen.
“I’m listening,” he says. Just then, we hear the all-aboard whistle, we hear the thunder of feet on the gangplank, we hear the boiler fire and roar, we hear the paddle wheels begin to turn, we hear the waves from the paddle wheels turning start to fwap against the concrete landing, and we hear the heavy iron chains creaking and straining against the force of the paddle wheels, struggling to keep the boat moored to the concrete landing. We know soon someone will come downstairs, knock on the door, and say, “Five minutes ’til curtain,” and before that happens we need to say what we need to say. About how we all fell in love with Gene Wilder when he was our Willy Wonka and we were his fat German, his spoiled heiress, his gum chewer, his gun-crazy American, his good-hearted Charlie Bucket. That we all married men and woman who looked like Mr. Wilder, and then divorced them because they just weren’t him, they weren’t what or who we were missing, no matter who they looked like. That even now, thirty years later, we still think about the jaunty angle of Mr. Wilder’s top hat; his unruly, matted side-parted hair; his dashing cane; the cut of his tapered pants; his gentle way with the Oompa Loompas. That we wish, when people ask us why we got divorced, we could say, “Because she cheated on me,” or “Because he got drunk and beat me with a piece of garden hose,” and not because he or she didn’t live up to the standard of a man with whom we spent six weeks thirty years ago. That we sometimes wish we’d never met Mr. Wilder, and that other times we wish we’d never met anyone else. We say all this in a rush, before the doctor can interrupt us, and by the time we’re done, we’re exhausted, wrung out; our lederhosen are drooping, our gum-chomping jaws weary, our supposedly sweatproof costumes completely sweated through. We look as though we’ve just been pulled out of the Ohio River, and we know what someone looks like when they’ve just been pulled out of the Ohio River, because we are there five hours later when Lisa is pulled out of the Ohio River, except when that happens, she’s dead, whereas we’re just divorced grown-up child actors who’ve sweated through our supposedly sweatproof costumes.
Price of the Haircut : Stories (9781616208240) Page 13