She wouldn’t talk with Allison either, and in the end, it was Allison and Daniel who did the mourning. She would walk into the house and see the two of them settled on the sofa talking softly, she saw how they quieted when she came in, but not before she heard her father’s name, not before she heard Duse’s.
When Duse called, it was Daniel who got on the phone and said soothing things, and it wasn’t until she saw Allison take the phone and express her sympathy that Isadora walked right over there and took the receiver from her. Intruders, she thought, intruders.
As the weeks passed, Duse began calling less and less, but Allison continued to settle down into the couch to talk with Daniel. She came home one evening and Daniel had his arms about Allison, both those dark heads were dipped down, and Isadora stood paralyzed in the doorway. When Daniel looked up to see her, he said simply that Allison was upset about something, that she had needed comforting. He left his arms where they were, and Isadora went into the kitchen to make tea. “Make some for us, would you—she could use some,” said Daniel. Isadora stood over the kettle, her hands pressed on the smooth enamel of the stove, thinking, I’m being replaced. I’m never weeping in his arms like that.
She brought out the tea. Allison was still wrapped about Daniel, her face damp. Isadora started to say something about her father, she could almost see herself speaking, how her face could crumple, how she could wedge herself back there with Daniel and talk about her grief and have him comfort her.
“My landlord raised my rent,” Allison said to Isadora. She was frazzled, she told Isadora, but Daniel was being wonderful, Daniel was offering to help her out until she got on her feet. “Daniel takes good care of me,” she said, grinning.
Isadora sat in the brown faded chair by the window. She looked at Allison’s hair and then touched the ends of her own, she looked at the way Allison was sitting, with her legs curled up on the couch, leaning against Daniel’s thighs, and she was suddenly ill with jealousy, she felt it clotting her blood, and all she could feel beside it was the sudden quick bite of fear.
Isadora decided to rent out her apartment. She suddenly had to have more of a claim on Daniel, less of her own solitude. She rented her place out herself, sitting on her bare wood floors, letting people in and letting them out again. She had to know who would be living there, who would be erasing her scent with his own. In the end, she rented it to a transfer student, a man from Wyoming who blushed when he asked if he could use her bathroom. It won Isadora over.
Daniel was delighted when Isadora told him she had rented her place. Allison merely blinked curiously.
“Now you’re talking,” said Daniel. “The next step is to get married.”
“That’s always the next step with Daniel,” said Allison.
But when Allison left, Daniel became serious. “Why not?” he said. “We could have an animal wedding, put flowers on the dogs, wreathe up the cats.”
“You’re only kidding,” said Isadora, turning from him, suddenly glum. “I should have kept my apartment.”
He looked at her, his hands in his pockets, and then he said that he wasn’t kidding, that he loved her.
“You were married before. You sure you want to do it again? Really?”
“Is that a yes?” said Daniel.
She let his smile catch her, let herself be teased and rolled into his arms, and then she wrapped herself about him, then she said her yes.
They had what Isadora called a tell-evening. They planned to have Allison over for dinner, and later to call both Duse and Daniel’s parents, who lived in California. Isadora felt funny about telling Allison. No matter what you thought about your exhusband, there still must be a sense of possession, of possibility. With a remarriage, that was severed. She asked Daniel about that, but he said she was just being silly, that Allison had The Swimmer, and she was fine.
Allison did seem fine. When she got over to the house, her hair was dripping pinpoints of water on her shirt, her eyes were red from the chlorine of the pool. Daniel took the dogs outside to run, to let the two women talk.
“We made love under water,” Allison told Isadora, darkening her grin. “The Swimmer has a key to the pool because he’s on the team, and this time he bribed one of the guards not to let anyone in while we were there. The water was so clean and new, the lights just splashed right off the ripples. We swam naked and I pretended to watch his diving form instead of his body.” She laughed. “You know something, when I see him tomorrow, I’ll be thinking about all his sperm in that warm pool water, all those poor innocent women swimming, ovulating, some of them, unaware of all those quick eager sperm swimming right along beside them.”
“Sperm don’t live that long, you dope,” said Isadora.
“But it’s fun to think so,” said Allison.
Daniel came back inside, panting, unleashing the dogs. “You talking about that dumb jock boyfriend again?”
“What, how you talk,” said Allison. “He could leave you on the bottom of the pool.”
They had salad and broccoli cheese toast, an invention of Isadora’s, which was really only sauteed broccoli and onions on toast with a layer of melted cheese bubbling over it. It was delicious and very messy. It ribbed itself on their chins. They ate in the bedroom, the door shut against the animals, and it was Daniel who told Allison the reason for the feast. Allison jumped up, tilting her wine glass, dousing the spread and herself. She draped herself over both of them, she whooped and kissed and cried. “When?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Daniel.
“You pin him down,” Allison told Isadora. “I know how he gets.
Daniel looked at her. “The end of the year,” he said.
Allison didn’t stay very long. She said her face ached from smiling and now she felt like going out and being with her swimmer. “You just saw him,” said Isadora.
“Not enough,” said Allison. Before she got to the door, she turned and looked at both of them. “Jesus. Married,” she said.
When Isadora heard the door shut behind Allison, she looped her arms about Daniel, she tried to pull him toward her for a kiss. “Let’s go call your mother,” he said.
In the end, they called his parents first. He sat Isadora down and gave her background. He warned Isadora, too, that the first thing his mother would want to know, the first words from his father, would be about kids. “They’re both kid-oriented. The biggest tragedy of their lives was only being able to have one kid. And even that took them years. They traipsed all over the country before I was conceived trying to figure out why my mother couldn’t get pregnant. There was really nothing wrong with either of them, and they suffered through all those tests, the crazy diets. My mother even took special douches to make herself more alkaline, more receptive to sperm. They never stopped trying, and as soon as my mother found herself pregnant with me, she couldn’t stop grinning, she was elated. That woman had the most pampered pregnancy in history. My father waited on her. I was the original spoiled child, but no matter how hard they tried, she never got pregnant again. It’s funny, but even now she’d still like to have one. When the doctor says she’s too old, she just tells him to go to hell.”
“How come they never adopted?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “My mother had this thing about carrying a child, about knowing it before it was born, knowing it was hers.”
“My mother would say they weren’t meant to have more kids. She’d say it was just fate,” said Isadora dryly.
“Well,” said Daniel, “maybe in this case, she’s right.”
He told her how his parents had become block parents. His mother always let the kids tromp through her home, scuffing up the floor, making black half moons on the surface with their heel marks. She never cared if they ground crumbs into her rug, if they ruined the feathering in her pillows because of their fights. She was always baking cookies, making doll clothes for all the little girls.
Daniel said he had grown up with a gaggle of friends. T
here was never any question of whose house offered up dinner. “My father was even more batty than my mother. He was a banker. He had a closet full of gray pinstripe suits, ties stippled with gold flecks, and his shoes were always so shiny I could see my own face wobbling in them. But no one could ever understand a man being so wild about kids. It was fine for my mother, she was a woman, that was how women were, but not for my father, not for a banker, for God’s sake.
“There was even a scandal. My father used to slow the car down when he pulled into the neighborhood; he’d beep the horn at the kids so they could ride with him. He was always hugging those kids, leaning right down to their level, not caring that some kid’s ice creamy mouth was smearing his white shirts. The kids all loved him. He didn’t have to bring them toys like their fathers, they smiled at him for nothing. All he had to do was just stand there and they’d all run to him, fighting to be first to wrap themselves up in his arms. It made me jealous. I got mean about it; I sulked. I wondered if he liked those other kids more than me, and to protect myself, I pretended I didn’t care. I slighted him. I told him I wanted to be an orphan. I said it to hurt him, but he just hugged me to him until I told him what was really bothering me, and then he said that I was the most important thing in his life.
“Well, rumors started up. People kept saying that there was something terribly wrong with a grown man acting like that with kids, carrying on. It really hurt him when parents started calling, coming over to the house, their faces polite and bland. They asked him very nicely to please not touch their children. One mother said that it wasn’t him so much, but they didn’t want their girl being friendly to any other older man, a stranger who might kidnap and abuse her. It wasn’t normal, she said.
“Well, my father stopped talking to the kids. They kept running after him for weeks, scrambling to get to him. But eventually they saw that he wasn’t going to stop. I guess they noticed how his face was hard and steely, and they never forgave him. It was terrible to watch his face. Jesus. It must have been hard for him to keep reining himself in like that, pretending he didn’t like their hugs, their affection. The kids gradually left him alone. They got older, they left, new kids came in, but they were strangers to my father, and he to them. But my father never told those kids that it was their parents and not him, who stopped the friendships. He took the blame; he didn’t think it was right for kids to hate their parents.”
“You knew all that when you were a kid?” said Isadora. “How come you never told the kids.”
Daniel’s face changed. “Don’t ask me things like that,” he said. “What do you want from me? I was a kid, what did I know? I liked having him for myself.”
He showed her a photo and then he phoned them. Isadora looked at his parents, the dark hair, the way they looked alike. When he put the receiver into Isadora’s hand, she was suddenly shy. There was no reason for it. They were really friendly to her. His mother told Isadora to come out and stay, even without Daniel; she said there was lots of room. She wanted Isadora to call her Betty and she said she had all kinds of baby things stored up. “For whenever,” she said. Daniel’s father had a lift in his voice and he told Isadora that he couldn’t wait to meet her, that he would love her like his own. When Isadora hung up, she was smiling.
It was different with her own mother, with Duse. Duse had to pull the news from Isadora, and then Duse acted as if she had known it all along. She wouldn’t let Isadora surprise her, and it depressed Isadora, it killed her desire to talk, and she put Daniel on the line.
Duse told him that she wanted them both to drive out and see her, as soon as possible. There were things she would have to see in his palm if he were really going to marry her girl. “I want to know if you’re her destiny,” she said.
“Sure I am,” said Daniel, rubbing his fingers up and down Isadora’s pale bare thighs.
“We’ll see,” said Duse.
When he hung up, Isadora wanted to know what Duse had said.
“She wants us to come out. And you know what—I think she really likes me. I really do.”
They took the next weekend to drive out there, leaving the house pets in Allison’s charge. Daniel let Isadora do some of the driving so that he could stretch out in the back seat and sleep, and it was then that she speeded, darting from lane to lane, loving the heady reckless way the road seemed swallowed up by her tires. As soon as she sensed Daniel stirring, she eased back into the speed limit. When she handed the wheel over to him, he was a little surprised to see how much ground they had covered. “Oh, there wasn’t much traffic,” said Isadora.
He had never been to Madison before and when they got to Isadora’s house, he said that seeing the place where she had grown up made him feel strange, a little sad. He took his time parking, feeling the curb with his tires.
Isadora always expected to sense that place as her home, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to her anymore; she felt like a guest, as much as Daniel. He was just turning off the motor when Duse bounded out, her wild red hair coming out of her careless braid, her restless hands pushing strands from her face. She clasped Daniel’s hands in hers, and then she flapped them right over and took a quick glance. He knew what she was doing, and he stood very still and waited. “Good lines,” she said.
“You think?” said Daniel.
“I know,” she said. She wrapped her arms about Isadora then, pulling her girl to her, and then she led them both inside. She had them sit down while she sliced up a coffee cake and boiled some water for tea. “You don’t mind the bags, do you?” she said. “I don’t like loose tea.” Isadora looked at her. “Someone could choke on the leaves,” Duse said innocently.
Isadora and Daniel would end up staying three days. Duse wouldn’t rearrange her schedule for them. She had clients wandering in and out, but she said strangers made her people feel uneasy, so she asked them to take walks, to leave, when clients came. Evenings, the three of them ate dinner and then Duse would abruptly decide to go to bed, she would just get up and leave them. Isadora showed Daniel the whole house, the photo gallery where he planted himself to stare. Isadora couldn’t look at those photos for very long. Not anymore. She stood with her face buried in Daniel’s shoulder, her eyes shut, while he looked.
They stayed in Isadora’s room. She dreamed once about her father, and she woke up crying. She didn’t feel less lonely, she didn’t take that dream as any sort of a comfort. All it was was a hazy shock and she wouldn’t tell anyone.
In the morning, after breakfast, they walked around. Daniel said he wanted to see Madison bats.
“I hate them,” Isadora said. “I used to think they were vampires. Sometimes at night, I’d go outside and sit on my front stoop and wait for the few bats that always managed to swoop by. I would try to figure out which one was Dracula, which ones were his slaves. I took to wearing a tiny imitation gold cross that I bought at the Thrift-T-Mart. I had to tuck it under my shirt because I didn’t want my parents to ask me about religion.”
“Isadora,” said Daniel.
“I carried garlic in my pockets, too,” she said. “Once in school, I sat down wrong; I crushed the cloves in my pocket and they started to smell. I saw the way kids crinkled up their noses when they came near me, but I couldn’t tell them, I couldn’t tell anyone.” She paused. “No, that’s not right. I could always tell Duse. Back then, I could tell her everything. I thought she knew everything there was to know. She was the one who told me vampires were just superstition. She said that Madison bats weren’t anything but bats, just doing whatever it was their bat genes told them to do. It’s so crazy, Daniel. When I think of all the weird things my mother actually believes, yet she knew enough to know that vampires didn’t exist, she knew enough to make sure I knew that, too, so I wouldn’t be afraid.”
They didn’t find any bats, although they prowled the university, the library malls, the woods. He said he liked Madison, and when they finally went back to Duse’s, he was holding her hands, and she was hungry.
He liked Duse. He brought her daisies. “She really believes what she does,” he told Isadora. “Nothing’s a lie if you feel it’s true.”
Isadora just looked at him.
Duse had a final talk with Isadora the morning they left. She waited until Daniel was outside fiddling with the car, and then she made Isadora sit down, she had her listen.
“Are you happy?” Duse wanted to know.
“I wanted to ask you that,” said Isadora.
“Aren’t you something. Of course I am. Don’t I seem that way?”
“I don’t know. I guess,” said Isadora. She fiddled with her fingers, she fretted them together. “Is it hard for you? Living here alone?” She felt something wrenching up inside of her when she looked at her mother. She could almost put herself inside that woman. She could feel how a life like that might be, how every cell of you would know something had been ripped out of your environment. How could you suddenly sleep alone after you had grown used to another body, to the way a curve fit against a curve, the way breath matched breath. The whole landscape of your life would be altered. Isadora didn’t think she could bear it.
“I’m not alone,” said Duse.
Isadora made her hands into spoons and fitted them over her knees. “Did you ever think about marrying again? You could. You meet a lot of people, don’t you?”
Duse tugged her hair out of its knot and twisted it around her hand before she reknotted it. “Martin was my destiny,” she said. “I’ve told you that before. You only get one destiny. I’ve never seen anyone with two.” She stroked Isadora’s hair. “We both have the same hair,” she said. “Are you doing all right, Isadora?”
“You think I’m not?”
“No,” said Duse. “But you listen. This doesn’t have anything to do with signs I’ve picked up, this is pure biology, pure mother’s intuition. You laugh, but you wait until you have a child. You’ll see the way it is. You can be doing something simpleminded like hanging up clothes, taking out garbage, and then you’ll just feel something, a tugging. You won’t know anything except that it has to do with your child.
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