Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  Alone with the kids, Liz lapses into thinking about Maddy. It’s been two long weeks now since she’s seen her. She thinks about the birthday cake she intended to bake for Pete, about how it was likely that when he was blowing out the candles, just in that instant before the lights went back on, that she would have spotted Maddy standing behind the others, laughing with the others, merging into the dark paneling of the kitchen wall. She sighs. Jake is saying, “Go, Ma.”

  “Go what?” she asks, looking up.

  “Go and help Mrs. Morgan in the kitchen. Duh!”

  Liz lowers Brigit to the carpet and hurries out of the room.

  “You know,” Gladys says, “he always finds an excuse to be out of the kitchen when it’s time to get everything ready.”

  Liz puts her wine glass down on the counter and holds out her hands to receive the stack of plates that Gladys is taking down from the cabinet. “I don’t mind helping,” she mumbles.

  “That’s not the point,” Gladys responds, handing over the plates. She stares at Liz.

  “Pete’s not much for kitchen work either,” Liz says, and she attempts a casual laugh. But apparently her fabrication doesn’t appease Gladys anyway, because she turns abruptly, so that her beautiful baby-fine hair spins out like a veil, and moves down along the counter.

  Liz carries the plates into the adjoining dining room and sets them down on the table. When she returns, Gladys hands her the silverware wordlessly, but still with a look in her eye which Liz interprets to mean that she continues to be peeved that Liz missed the point. Back in the dining room, Liz takes a pile of linen napkins from the top of the buffet and begins to set the table. When she goes back into the kitchen, she sees that Gladys has set out a cutting board and some salad vegetables. As Gladys is busy rinsing lettuce at the sink, Liz assumes the board is for her and goes right to work. She can hear her kids laughing in the other room. She doesn’t hear the men. She guesses they are still outside, having a man-to-man out in the street maybe.

  “I wouldn’t mind so much if I were home all day,” Gladys says.

  “What kind of work does Daniel do?” Liz asks, thinking to modify the course of the conversation.

  Gladys cocks her head and stares at her incredulously. “He’s an artist! Didn’t you notice the paintings?”

  Actually, Liz hadn’t bothered to look for a signature. She hadn’t liked them that much. They were all of nudes, all very abstract, more concerned with technique than expression, with genitalia than visage.

  “I was his model for a time. That’s how we met.”

  “That’s nice,” Liz responds encouragingly.

  Gladys rolls her eyes. “‘Nice,’ she says. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be married to an artist?”

  Liz finds the remark insulting. After all, Pete is still an artist in some sense. “Pete used to write novels before—” she begins.

  Gladys nods impatiently. “Yes, yes. I know that. But when he saw that he wasn’t making enough money to live on, he took the commercial route. Daniel has never sold enough for us to live on. Without my salary, we’d be out in the street. Not that I could bear to stay home. I don’t know how you do it. It’s just that I’d like to have the choice. And I’d prefer not to have to support him. You know what I mean? He’d never consider using his talents commercially like Pete did. Oh, no. He’d call that prostitution. Do you realize how much money he could make doing graphics for an ad agency? So I support us while he paints.” She shrugs. “He cleans, I cook. He thinks that’s fair. But with only two of us, the house doesn’t get very dirty. You know what I mean? And of course if you’re cooking for two, you might as well be cooking for ten.” She shrugs again. Then she dries her hands on the dish towel that is hanging from her shoulder and hurries out of the room.

  Liz chuckles aloud. If Pete said Gladys Morgan was so-so, she thinks now, it was probably because he thought she was asking about her personality—not her looks. She feels like celebrating. She puts aside the chopping knife and gulps down the remainder of the wine in her glass. Then she refills the glass to the top and drinks down to where it was before Gladys left the room. She takes up the knife again and waits for the buzz to come. When the buzz comes, she is hoping, either she will no longer seem like the type of woman to whom strangers tell their marital problems, or she’ll shrug it off, say, Hey, so what?

  Gladys returns with a large wooden salad bowl. “I hear your father’s sick,” she says. “Pete tells me you’re going to have to put him into a nursing home.”

  Liz stops chopping. “Pete said what?”

  Gladys is staring at the last whole tomato. “Here,” she says, sliding the cutting board out from under Liz’s nose. “Let me do that. You go call in the men and your kids. I think we’re just about ready here.”

  Liz turns obediently and heads for the living room with her eyes glued to the floor. She can’t imagine why Pete would say such a thing. Her father is sick, yes, paralyzed on one side and enfeebled on the other, and worse, groping to express himself. But she never said she was considering sending him to a nursing home. In fact, she said just the opposite. After the first stroke, the doctors thought that he’d be able to go home and live a fairly normal life. But after the second, which occurred several days later, it became obvious that Sherri, whose own disabilities had become increasingly clear to the hospital staff, couldn’t possibly take on such a burden. It was then that they advised a nursing home, and then that Liz began to think about bringing him to her house.

  There are some logistical problems. The front porch is certainly large enough to be made into a sickroom, but that would take more money than they have just now, and more time than the doctors are willing to give them. They’ve already made it clear that now that his condition is stable, her father is merely taking up a much needed bed. She thought of doubling up the girls so that he could have one of their rooms, but Brigit is such a light sleeper, and Katie talks to Isabel half the night. And then when she went upstairs to have a look, she realized that neither room is really large enough to accommodate two beds anyway. She considered talking to Jake about sharing his room with her father, but in the end she saw that that would be unfair. Jake is getting to the age where he spends more and more time in his room.

  Liz concluded that the only viable solution was to set up a sick bed in the living room until they could manage to fix up the porch. But Pete wouldn’t hear of it. He argued that her father was far better off in a nursing home than out in the middle of the living room. And when he saw that she was set on it, he came up with what he thought was a terrific compromise. Her father could stay in the living room for the short term, but he wasn’t about to re-finance the house to fix up the porch. Business-wise, it made no sense. They would never get the money back out of such an improvement because the house was too small and dilapidated to begin with. He suggested they begin to look around for a larger house. It would cost less in the long run, especially now that interest rates were so low. Liz said that a house became a sacred thing after a time, domus and all that. It was where all a family’s ceremonies—birthdays, holidays, tooth-fairies—took place. A home, she told him, is different than a house and can’t be thought of as a marketable commodity.

  Of course Maddy is the real reason she refused to consider leaving the house. Unlike Isabel, who is imaginary anyway, Maddy doesn’t travel. But Liz couldn’t bring herself to tell Pete that she lives as much for Maddy’s infrequent visitations as she does for the other children. It’s been eleven years now, and she hasn’t even told him about the visitations themselves. She’s afraid he’d equate them with Katie’s contrivance of Isabel. He despises Isabel. He feels threatened by her. He’s a perfectionist, and Isabel is another flaw in his world. He insists that Isabel is the emblem of Katie’s rebellious nature. Surely his urgent need for logic and normalcy would compel him to see Maddy as the emblem of some flaw in Liz’s nature. He would insist that she see someone. And then what? To have someone else’s estimate of her ex
perience interfering with her own? She knows what she knows.

  In the end, she gave up discussing the matter with him, though of course it is still very much on her mind. He had no right to speak to Gladys about it. He had no right to assume that her dismissal of it meant that she’d decided to put her father in a nursing home after all.

  The men are just coming through the front door with Brigit’s things when Liz enters the living room. “Come on, everybody,” she says dully, and she scoops up Brigit and turns back into the hall. Katie and Jake bump into her as they pass her.

  Daniel goes right to his seat at the far end of the table while the Arroways stand at the threshold waiting to be directed. Gladys stands with her finger on her lips, deciding. Liz notices that she replaced the linen napkins she set out with paper ones. She also placed a vase of white carnations at the center of the table. “You sit there,” she says to Jake, and he moves to sit on Daniel’s right. “You, there,” she says to Liz, indicating the seat to Daniel’s left. She puts Katie next to Jake and the sassy-seat on Liz’s other side, across from Katie. Then she and Pete sit down at the other end of the table.

  The flowers and the children make a sharp, Z-shaped division between Daniel and Liz and Pete and Gladys. That’s fine with Liz; she has no desire to speak to either of them. She begins to fill her plate and to cut up morsels from it for Brigit. Brigit gobbles them up almost as soon as she puts them in front of her. “So, what kind of work do you do?” Daniel asks.

  As she is looking away from Brigit, Liz happens to notice Jake. Having behaved so well for so long, now it appears that he intends to balance things out. He’s stuck a smile-shaped tomato slice into his mouth and is manipulating it so that it will cover his teeth. Liz looks to make sure that Pete hasn’t noticed. He hasn’t. He is already engaged in a conversation with Gladys—who has apparently put her domestic laments aside and is actually looking quite cheerful now. Liz tries to catch a word or two, but with Jake showing her his tomato smile and Daniel still waiting for a response to his question, and the buzz just making its debut, she is unable.

  “I’m a home manager,” she says, taking up her wine glass. She squints at Jake to get him to stop, but he only broadens his tomato smile. She makes her face more severe, and when Daniel turns to see what she is looking at, Jake’s lips close over the tomato.

  “You’re in real estate then,” Daniel says.

  She stares at him. His face is as fuzzy as his comment. But she manages to bring them both into focus quickly enough. She laughs. “No, I manage our house, our lives. With four children …” She laughs again, “I mean, with three children to look after, I don’t get time to do much else. Really, I seldom have the time to even think about it … I seldom have the time to think at all!”

  Daniel nods indifferently and begins to eat. Liz decides that she doesn’t like him any more than she does Gladys. She glances at Jake again and finds that he is still up to no good. He has taken two black olives from his salad bowl, and with one hand aside his face to shield his antics from his father, he is carefully inserting the olives onto his front teeth. She can see that one of two things will have to happen in order for him to stop. Either someone will have to catch him, or she will have to laugh—which is what he really wants. “He wouldn’t do these things if you didn’t laugh,” Pete always says. But she can never keep from laughing, even when she’s just as angry with Jake as Pete is. In fact, the angrier she becomes, the harder she laughs. Sometimes, red and breathless from laughter, she reaches across the table and slaps Jake. But her state always makes the slap into a weak, comic, inconsequential thing which only serves to increase her anger and therefore her laughter. If she had a choice, she’d yell like Pete does. But the valve that lets her anger out has been closed for a long time now. It’s a faulty mechanism. So when Jake pops up with his eyes crossed or a string bean inserted in his ear, she responds the only way she knows how. And Pete, who doesn’t understand about damaged valves, responds to her by taking up his plate and finishing his meal elsewhere.

  Jake is ready. He tucks in his bottom lip and slips his olive teeth over it, his body quaking with silent laughter. Liz feels the giddiness rising up in her, merging with the buzz. With the corner of her eye she can see Brigit groping for more food. She turns to Daniel quickly. “And you’re an artist!” she declares cheerfully, hoping to expel some of the giddiness so that it won’t overtake her. Jake swallows his olives and cups both hands out in front of his chest to approximate the breasts in Daniel’s paintings. “Gladys tells me that she used to model for you.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Daniel says. He clears his throat. “Have you ever modeled? You have great eyes and rather nice cheek bones.”

  Liz laughs and reaches for her wine glass. Pete’s voice cuts through the chaos of her thoughts. “Something wrong over there?”

  “Nothing,” Jake mumbles, picking up his fork.

  “Speak up,” Pete says.

  Katie speaks up for him. “Nothing, he said.”

  Liz notices that there are two peas and a piece of meat out on the table between Jake’s plate and Katie’s. She glances at Pete in time to see him noticing them too. The sight of the color rising to his face makes her tremble with giddiness. And when she looks at Katie, she sees that she is trembling with the same. As long as the Morgans fail to detect her actions, Katie knows, her father won’t mention them either—for now at least. Pete turns back to Gladys and they resume their conversation. Tear-sheets, Liz hears Gladys say, something about tear-sheets. They are only talking shop.

  “No, I never modeled,” Liz tells Daniel. And then, because the evening is going all wrong, because she is angry with Pete and dislikes Gladys and the kids are beginning to get to her—and maybe too because of the buzz—she decides that she is justified in wanting to amuse herself a little, and she adds, “I have a masters in Philosophy.” Daniel’s eyebrows shoot up right away. “When Brigit gets older, I’m planning to go back to school and get my doctorate. I’ll probably teach after that … or maybe write a text book, something to simplify the subject for students.” She glances at Jake and sees that he is amused with her exaggeration as well.

  “Why philosophy?” Daniel asks.

  “Why not? With all our technological advances, what could be more crucial than the discipline that strives to consider the ethical consequences of our decisions and the epistemological consequences of the technology itself?” she says, or something of that nature. She has to fight like hell to hold her laughter back. She sounds like a textbook! She couldn’t have repeated herself for all the peace of mind in the world. She doesn’t even know if she’s made any sense. But Daniel is nodding, encouragingly, she thinks, as if he understands perfectly and is eager to have her go on. She decides to oblige him. “Things like artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood and … and—”

  “And freeze-dried corpses,” Jake volunteers cheerfully.

  Liz ignores him. She’s having fun now. If she laughs now, it will be at her own antics. Jake can hang from the chandelier now or stuff all the carnations into his mouth and she won’t as much as chuckle. “I like Sartre,” she declares. “He was always my favorite.”

  “Oh, yes, Sartre,” Daniel says. “Bad faith and all that.”

  “Yes,” Liz agrees. “He believed that when people allow circumstances or other people to govern their actions, they are acting in bad faith.”

  “But we all do that to some degree. It’s unavoidable.”

  “No, it’s really not when you think about it,” Liz responds. The truth is that she hasn’t thought about it herself in many years, since her undergraduate days, when, in fact, she did major in Philosophy—until she dropped out of school. And until Daniel mentioned “bad faith,” she’d forgotten entirely what Sartre was about. But now fragments of his philosophy are drifting back to her, tumbling through her half-inebriated mind like meteors through an indifferent universe. “We say,” she says, “that this circumstance or that person is an obstacle
in our lives. But really the person or circumstance is neutral. Our perception of them illuminates them and lends them their favorable or adverse air. When something happens, we can complain about it or we can act on it.” She thinks of Gladys and smiles. “We’re always free to rebel. Sure, there might be resistance, but without it, we would accomplish whatever we set out to accomplish, and I suppose that would get dull pretty fast. The idea is that in attempting to accomplish, our perception of the obstacle is modified. Now we can act in accordance with that modification. We’ve avoided the pitfall of choosing to see the obstacle as it initially appeared. And we’ve confirmed our freedom, for better or worse.”

  There. And she’s confirmed hers. Pete is always talking about challenging conversations. What does he know about them? If he really wanted to have a challenging conversation, he would jump in like she had, talk to someone he didn’t know about something he knew next to nothing about. Now that was a challenge.

  Daniel nods, his lips pursed to confirm that he is considering it all. Liz taxes her mind to think of something more to say on the matter. But just as she is about to proceed, Brigit begins to fuss. She gives her a slice of bread to quiet her down. Then she glances at Jake and sees that he is eating the morsels that Katie set out for Isabel. When she looks at Katie, she finds her staring back at her, wide-eyed and piqued, trying to call her attention to Jake’s malice.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel says. “I mean, there was nothing in his philosophy about community, about the potential for harmony among men. If I remember correctly—and I’m nowhere near as well versed on this stuff as you are—he saw love as either an act of sadism or of masochism, either trying to possess the other or giving in to the other’s attempt to possess—”