“He’ll go crazy. It could wreck things. What was I thinking? I’ve got these little papers all over the place. Reminders. Get the starter looked at. Get the strap fixed on my sandal. Take Geneva to shop for napkins. Napkins. Ursula, could you get them? I don’t want to drive. My car is acting up. And it’s like only half my brain is in gear. Sometimes I wish Fish had—”
“What do I say? Katie? When they come?”
“Tell them to come back Monday. Say he’s gone for the rest of the week. Monday is soon enough! Ursula. I still love him. That’s not what this is about.”
“I’ll get the napkins. I don’t see why Geneva has to go at all. What about you? Are you going to be okay?”
Katie groaned. “I don’t know. I won’t know till it’s over.”
Ursula goes upstairs to dress. A strange sound is coming from the bathroom. Not quite a groan. Something more petulant.
“Juliette, is that you?” Ursula taps at the door. When there is no answer, Ursula opens the door and sticks her head in. Juliette is standing in front of the mirror with her arms crossed over her breasts, her hands drooping off her shoulders. Seeing her mother in the mirror, she whirls and glares.
“I hate them!”
“What, baby? What is it?”
Juliette throws her arms out dramatically, baring the expanse of her white throat and the pink leotard she is wearing. She is a lovely girl. “They’re getting BIGGER!” she says, horror in her voice.
It takes a moment for Ursula to realize that Juliette is speaking of her breasts. She has never progressed much beyond a pubescent pair of bumps, but now Ursula can see that she is right, they are filling, rounding, though you would hardly call them a bosom. Not on a girl who weighs a hundred pounds.
“Oh honey, they’re nothing!” Ursula says, almost laughing. She remembers her girlhood chums weeping into their fists because they had little breasts instead of Ursula’s full ones.
“If I turn out to have breasts like yours, I am going to have them cut off!” Juliette pushes past Ursula and out of the room.
Ursula washes her face and combs her tangled hair. She has no part. Her hair springs out in all directions. After an inch of growth, it begins to tighten at the ends, then to dry and break off. It is time for a cut. Juliette has inherited enough of Ursula’s curly genes to have a mass of waves, and curls and wisps where she keeps pieces trimmed. Her color is better than Ursula’s flat brown, with the russet tones of the Fishers.
In her room, Ursula puts on one of her nice-lady outfits, a jersey shirtwaist suitable for court or meetings. Michael is dressing with fastidious tedium, tugging and tucking to get his shirt set just so. He has his pants partway down his hips, the fly open, his hips thrust to one side to hold them up. She resists the urge to swat him. She eyes a pile of laundry in the corner, much of which will have to be ironed—a task she usually tackles during Sunday night’s Masterpiece Theatre show. She sometimes wishes that Michael would wear polyester like other teachers, but it was she who taught him to love cotton. He could wear jeans these days, teaching, but he likes a certain quality twill.
She admires his flat ass. A Fisher trait. Carter has inherited her roundness and short waist. Though he is a good-looking boy, he won’t wear so well as his dad.
“Shove that all down the laundry chute,” she says. “I’ll go down and put a load in to wash.”
The door to the basement snaps behind her with a loud crack, like a gunshot. She insisted Michael install a spring-door because nobody ever closes the damned door, but sometimes it surprises her, it works so well.
In the basement she picks clothes up from the area below the chute, and hurriedly sorts them into piles of dark and light. She stuffs the light clothes into the washer, adds detergent, and hesitates for a moment. If Fish is asleep, he won’t be when she starts this machine. She punches ON. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of life, no sounds from behind the curtain that separates Fish’s sleeping area from the rest of the basement.
Someone flushes the toilet in the corner and turns on the shower. Well, tough on that score, too, because the washer will pull off the water pressure, but she doesn’t feel bad enough about it to turn the machine off. Besides, Fish knows about the water. And he has more time than she does.
She notices that the door to the outside is slightly ajar. Damn him! she thinks. She has a thing about doors, granted, but is it really too much to ask Fish to close the door when he comes in at night? They have been robbed; it is not just a theoretical threat. Once in Portland someone came in while they were gone during the day, and took their stereo, the only thing they owned of value, and a box of mushrooms. Then, here, the first year Carter was in high school, someone came in the unlocked front door early in the morning, and drove her Toyota away, while they were all upstairs, dressing.
She goes up the two steps to the door and slams it shut and locks it.
She is wiping off the breakfast table when she hears Juliette shriek. By the time she gets to her daughter’s room, Michael is already there. Juliette’s windows overlook the street on one side, and a row of wisteria on the other.
“He was peeing on our bushes!” Juliette says furiously. “Without a stitch on!”
Michael looks over his shoulder at Ursula. “Who else?” he says calmly.
“I thought he was in the shower.” Ursula remembers she locked the basement door.
A car comes to a screeching stop at the curb. Michael sticks his head out Juliette’s window and yells, “Better get your butt indoors, Fish!”
“Oh no!” Ursula yells. Suddenly she realizes that it was Fish’s girlfriend in the shower, so Fish went outside rather than come upstairs to the bathroom. Before she locked the door.
Ursula races down the stairs to intercept the process server at the door, but as he reaches the steps, so does Fish, stark naked. Ursula throws open the door and cries, “You’ve got the wrong address!”
The process server, who knows a loser when he sees one, thrusts the summons into Fish’s hand. “Looks like she’s already got everything you had,” he says, slapping his thigh and laughing.
Fish, bewildered, stands on the porch with his behind exposed for all the world to see. “Come ON,” Ursula tells him. He darts past her, dropping the summons on the floor as he flees. Ursula picks it up slowly, as though it weighs a lot.
I’ll tell Katie they delivered it while I was on the phone, she thinks. I won’t say what happened.
But she will. Telling stories is one way to talk without too much intrusion. It’s a way of creating and remembering their lives even as they live them. Sometimes, though, it is white noise.
She turns and finds Michael behind her. He puts his arms around her and pulls her close. “Poor guy,” he murmurs. “Lucky us.”
Ursula’s heart flutters. Ahh, she thinks, like a heroine in a bodice-ripper. She can hear time ticking by; they are standing by an antique grandfather clock that runs but doesn’t chime. “I’ve got to go,” she whispers reluctantly. She runs and grabs her sweater off the back of a chair at the dining table, her purse from the kitchen counter. She yells goodbye to Michael from the front door. “See you tonight!” she calls.
In the car she begins to sing, only “La la la,” tunelessly. Even Carter would not be able to ruin a lyrical line from Michael.
She drives off down the street, glad to get the day begun. Her work is filled with pathos, and sometimes tragedy, peopled with victims and villains, pitiful actors all, and still she goes at it, day after day, with enthusiasm. It is important not to stand too close. You can’t help if you are a burn-out. People are mostly predictable, and you second-guess them. Sometimes you are shocked, and you collect those times into a repertoire. You bear occasional anguish as a wave so far from sea. You work quickly, without haste. You make good decisions and document them well. You do a lot, really.
You understand how precious your own ordinary, happy, pocked life is. Every day, you have some reason to be, some moment when you are, grateful.
15
The yellow sticky-backed note on the wall by Katie’s phone says, “Geneva/napkins/W.” Katie hangs up and peels off the note, crumples it and drops it in the brown paper bag by the refrigerator. Cautiously, she leans across the airspace above the bag and sniffs lightly. She accumulates so little garbage, she sometimes forgets to put it outside, and tuna cans, discarded bologna, stale bread, and crumpled take-out boxes have a way of festering and then erupting into full blown stench. This bag is less than half-full, and holds only paper, yogurt containers, and coffee grounds. She has not eaten at home in days. She snacks on the leftovers brought home by her neighbor Maureen, who is a cook in a vegetarian deli. She nibbles crackers and dry cereal without milk. She goes out with her lover, Jeff, and eats what he has chosen, agreeing always that it is delicious. She learned to eat anything, without complaint, from living with Fish; Fish used odd food to test her spunkiness. She has eaten sardines, sushi, several kinds of game, black mushrooms, Chinese soup with chicken feet, roots, berries and wild greens gathered while camping. Whenever she has spent time alone, she hasn’t known what she wanted. Sometimes when Fish was gone, she ate nothing except a meal once a day where she worked.
Her lover is an agricultural geneticist. He has developed an orange baby cauliflower. A crop is growing right now, hydroponically, at the agricultural experimental station. A few years ago he helped develop a delicate, blush-red pear. These pears are grown here, in this valley, but they must be further modified, for a hardier fruit, to withstand shipping. Since she learned about this exotic pear, Katie has looked forward with increasing longing to the late summer harvest, thinking of it at odd, inappropriate moments, such as during lovemaking, or as she attaches braided trim to an officer’s jacket for the Chekhov production. She prefers thoughts of the pear to thoughts of her lover. Meanwhile, Jeff’s attention has turned to grapes. He praises the conditions in the region, saying they are just right for producing varietals as good as in the Napa and Sonoma areas. Small wineries have sprung up all over. A Frenchman has even gone into partnership with a retired movie special-effects man to make a local brandy. Jeff says vintners are interesting people. He doesn’t comment on wine drinkers.
It occurs to Katie that Jeff may see her as yet another hybrid, perhaps a wild fruit brought into the station for domestication. He professes delight in her somewhat out-of-date personal style (the long, straight hair, usually in braids or a ponytail; her “clear-washed”—his phrase—makeupless face, her disdain for hose, bra, slip, jewelry). At the same time, he brings her gifts obviously chosen to improve the appearance he claims charm him. He gives her lacquered hairclips and a straight linen skirt, a pale gray charmeuse slip, a fine gold chain, and perfume. He asks her about prospects for training in costuming, as if he cannot perceive her contentment as a seamstress-lackey who presses seams, sews velcro in garments for quick strips, stitches decorative trims, and the like. She does not try to tell him how like a resigned stepchild she is, working among women who have college degrees in theatre, or certificates of design and garment construction, portfolios of fiber art. Even the few other local women who were hired purely as seamstresses have vastly more experience than she, and keen ambition. They buy their own copies of books like Flat Patternmaking, and An Encyclopedia of World Costumes, books that make Katie’s eyes tear from the strain of reading them. She lets Jeff make what he wants of her modest position. She doesn’t blame him; everyone assumes something extraordinary about people who work in the theatre, even if their jobs involve mailing brochures and selling tickets.
Though Katie only mildly wonders about Jeff’s affection for her (whatever he says, she believes it is sexual), she is increasingly bewildered by her growing attachment to him, not so much emotionally as practically. He has begun to direct more and more aspects of her life. He takes for granted their coupleship, when she is still married to another man. She knows she has let this happen, that his behavior has intensified since Fish returned and she continued to maintain her own place to live. When she did not find a way to resume residence with her husband, she let Jeff assume a kind of authority over her, without ever deciding to do so, and lately it has begun to vex her. She especially minds the way he has begun to ask her questions about her life: whether Fish ever hit her, if she ever wanted children (he doesn’t know about Rhea). He asks her questions like, “What worries you most in life?” She replies, “Earthquakes and spiders,” trying not to smirk. In turn, he tells her about himself. He tells her how he used to be terrified of water, how hard it was to learn to swim, which he now does well. Late one night, he tells her about the time in graduate school when he stole the idea of a paper from an old master’s thesis. He is quick to say it wasn’t really plagiarism—in the end he wrote every word—but he feels guilty that he leaned so far that way. He says he thinks the experience has been for the best, that it has made him a more moral man. He talks about essays he reads in Esquire on friendship among men, sportsmanship, medical ethics. He seems to want her to prize his candor, but she is often bored and distracted, and cannot appreciate it when he says he talks to her more intimately than he has to other women.
She wonders how he can be so wrong about her, what need in him has invented her. She claims intimacy, in all the world, only with Fish, and it has come not so much from mutual disclosure as from years of accumulated, shared experience. From their shared dreams, now faded. From their shared debts, as to her mother, and losses, as Rhea. From the ways they have tried not to be the persons their parents shaped, using one another to fight history and habit and proclivity.
She has her own life to think about, and cannot envision revealing it to Jeff. She is weary with trying to analyze her own behavior, though she has yet to find any clear direction in the effort. She often feels a clutch in her thinking, like a case of mental cramps.
She cannot really remember making the decision to divorce Fish. The impulse was hers (and not Jeff’s). It is not the first time she has considered it. She remembers Ursula suggesting it—tentatively, to be sure—years before. What Ursula said was, “You can decide how you want to live. You don’t have to keep on like this.” What crisis was she in then, to garner such advice from Ursula? She cannot recall, it does not matter, except that no one seems to understand why Katie has stayed with Fish anyway. Her mother is in a state of perpetual surprise that the marriage has “lasted.”
This time, though, the idea came to her one particular evening last December, when it was rainy and cold, and she was sopping with self-pity and resentment that Fish was in jail and not with her. She tried the idea out on Ursula later—not long after she met Jeff, true—and something in saying it out loud gave it authenticity. “I could divorce him,” she remembers thinking. “I’ve already got a boyfriend,” a fact that, though it may have greased the wheels on which her notion rode, hardly gave it substantial argument. Then she grew piqued that Fish would not write her and would not let her come see him. “I’ll show him.” She may have thought that.
Besides, getting a divorce from a difficult man will please the critics (only her mother comes instantly to mind), will appear as a “step in the right direction,” when all along she has been bobbing in her life like a plastic duck in a tub of water.
Only this morning, as she moves around, dressing and making her bed, drinking coffee and picking at her nails, she is overwhelmed by the fierceness of her relief—almost elation—that she has intervened in time to stop the papers being served on Fish. It is as if some third party has set the divorce in motion, and she has put out her arm to stop the speeding train.
Relieved as she is, perhaps because she knows she will be seeing Fish on Saturday, she feels very much on his side.
16
It is after six when Ursula gets home.
She is surprised to find Michael in the kitchen, staring off in the direction of the back yard. The radio is on too low to hear. He is missing his beloved All Things Considered.
“Hi,” she says. She sees that
he has washed up from breakfast. She also sees that Carter has been through. An open peanut butter jar sits surrounded by crumbs, with a dirty knife alongside. She wants to sound chatty. Michael doesn’t like to be probed. But she wonders what he is thinking, even if she does have a master’s in counseling and knows people have a right to inner privacy. Space. Whatever you call it. Michael’s seems so vast and pristine, and thus so alluring.
“Caught you idle,” she manages to say.
“The back yard is shabby,” he replies. “I was wondering if I ought to build some sort of patio out under the sycamore. Or a gazebo.” He will be looking for a summer project, of course. “Or do you think the sycamore sheds too much, that I’d be brushing away seed balls half the year?”
“You already do.” Ursula is pleased with this train of thought. Sometimes she is appalled by the shabbiness of their house. They can afford to fix it up. She ought to have someone in to clean it properly now and then. They have stuffed it and piddled at minor remodeling efforts, but it is a house in need of attention. Or a move. Could Michael be talked into a new house? She imagines expanses of bare white wall, water running through smooth new pipes. A shower.
“The porch is okay,” Michael muses. Fish built it for them a couple of years ago. It is a wide, bare-wood affair with latticework along two sides, and a partial roof, and bentwood benches built in the shade. Ursula was thrilled with that project, too. She envisioned herself holding soirees in the late summer evenings. And not just social workers (Michael hates their talk), but people from the college and the theatre. Some of these transplanted hip California types, with their sound studios and art galleries. Of course she doesn’t know those people, and she never seems to have any time. They don’t even invite Michael’s fellow teachers over. And last summer the family didn’t eat outside five times. It was silly of them. All they need is a few of those cheap lawn chairs, already stacked up for sale like hats at K-Mart.
Beyond Deserving Page 6