Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  In the year that followed his departure from writing, Pete took a post at the local high school filling in for an English teacher who was away on maternity leave. He had no liking for this position, Liz confided, and although he had no idea what he would try next, decided he would not seek to extend it beyond his initial commitment. Then, at the end of the school year, he chanced to hear about an agency that dedicated itself to coupling those who could write with those who could not but had, nevertheless, something they wished to communicate through that medium.

  His first assignment was ghost-writing a travel journal for a man who had sailed to the Arctic on a research vessel. Pete was understandably skeptical; he had never set foot on a boat in his life. He didn’t even know how to swim! But as he had no other prospects for employment, he doused his landlubber sensibilities ’neath the wine-dark cascades of the local library. And when he emerged, according to Liz’s account, he knew all there was to know about boats, boating, and the Arctic. The resulting book (which was much longer and more detailed than either the agency or its client had anticipated) was published to some critical acclaim.

  Pete was very much in demand with the agency’s other clients after that. And as for himself, his success had brought him so much confidence that he lost his fear of taking on subjects about which he had no prior knowledge. In this way he came to write political speeches, fund-raising letters, brochures describing the benefits of various institutions, a guide to the stock market, a cookbook, and, if Liz could be believed, even some love letters for an elderly man who was still pursuing the woman he had first loved a half-century and two marriages earlier. Then, in 1986, Pete hired a secretary and a research assistant and began a ghost-writing service of his own. Thus, even as his potential for fame in his own right diminished, he found a measure of happiness penning the thoughts of others, seeing others reap the benefits of his labors. And because he never turned down a job, because he was as willing to write as earnestly for a hawk as for a dove, for a shrewd opportunist as for a bleeding heart, he came to feel that he was embarking on a greater understanding of his fellow man than he could have ever attained with his fiction.

  Martha can sum up the prominent details of Pete Arroway’s transformation from inferior novelist to successful (if you measure a man’s success by his outlook and not by the appearance of his house or the attire of his children) businessman in minutes. It is astonishing to her that it took so long to amass. The problem has been that like Jake now, Liz was never as candid as Martha would have liked. As it was, Liz looked aside and bit down on her bottom lip whenever Martha asked about her husband’s activities, which assured Martha that she was less than satisfied with the way things had turned out herself. On the other hand, when Martha asked her about herself (which she did initially only to insure further communication), she turned her lovely green eyes on Martha and described with some measure of gusto her efforts to save the whales, spare the forests, and recycle every last item that entered her house. (Martha, being a bibliophile, has already tried her suggestion for using old telephone-book pages to catch potato peelings.) She gardened, sewed, read books on global warming, and looked after her growing brood. That was her life, as far as Martha could determine. She vaguely remembered another Liz who came and went with some frequency before the tragedy, so she wrote her off as an agoraphobic who never recovered from that. But then, last summer, she began to wonder whether her assessment had been too hasty.

  She had been sitting near the window with her Paradise Lost on her lap (lost herself, not in Paradise but in her desire for more authentic drama) when she saw Liz come out of the house and plop herself down on the stoop. Her heaving chest and slightly opened mouth suggested that she had been arguing with someone indoors. Her thin legs protruded from her baggy, tan shorts and her feet were garbed in white sneakers with thick white socks low around her ankles. Her long, straight, blondish hair, which she generally pulled back when the weather was warm, hung on her shoulders like a loosely-woven shawl. She would have been beautiful had she a bit more flesh between her nose and her upper lip—a flaw that Martha didn’t generally notice because of her eyes.

  While Martha watched her, Liz calmed down and eventually closed her mouth. Her hands, which had been dangling between her knees, parted ways and came to land on either side of her on the stoop, so that she seemed about to raise herself and go back in. Then all at once she jerked her head up and stared, as cats do when they have been startled by some sudden sound. Martha stretched her neck to see what she might have been looking at, for it seemed her eyes were focused on something close at hand. And yet there was nothing of interest (indeed, nothing at all save a dying elm) between her house and Martha’s. Then Liz smiled sweetly, as though someone had just said a consoling word to her. Her right hand lifted, spread its fingers toward her invisible patron, and fell again. She lowered her head, and, a moment later, got up slowly and went in, still smiling vaguely.

  What had Liz Arroway seen, Martha wondered, that she herself was incapable of seeing? Some bird flying back to its nest with its mouth stuffed full of worms for its young? But her eyes had not been lifted high enough to have been watching something in flight. And her smile was not the casual thing with which one generally regards such a sight. No, Martha thought there was some passion in that smile; it was the window through which she saw her neighbor’s heart thaw.

  Once, a cousin of Martha’s came to visit her from the city on a summer night. She met him in the driveway, and as she was taking his arm to lead him into the house, he exclaimed, “How do you tolerate this racket?” “What racket?” Martha asked. “The crickets!” he responded incredulously. The crickets, yes. Martha had become so accustomed to the sound that she no longer heard them. Likewise, she had become so used to Liz’s icy composure that until she saw her heart thaw, she had not realized that it was frozen.

  She began to question Liz more earnestly then on matters concerning herself. She learned, little by little, for instance, that before the tragedy (of which Liz never spoke directly), she had worked part time for the philosophy department at the State University. Though she had dropped out of college before getting her degree, she had majored in Philosophy and had enjoyed her continued affiliation with the department. (Martha assumed that Pete’s characterizations of his philosophical types had their inception with her.) Martha contrived, too, to acquaint Liz with some facts about herself. She led her to believe that she regretted that she saw her grandchildren so infrequently (a fabrication of some dimension). Then, too, she asked her questions about her children, feigning amazement at the minor achievements with which Liz endowed them. In short, she attempted to endear herself to Liz Arroway. And when she felt fairly certain that Liz was becoming accustomed to her “good nature,” she offered to babysit should the need arise.

  She might have given up long ago, she thinks now as she watches Jake crumble the candy wrapper and slip it between the sofa cushions. But she didn’t; she persevered, and now here she is, finally, sitting in her living room with the Arroway brats scattered throughout her house. At last, she has a foothold. It would be negligent to press too hard and risk its loss. She decides not to question Jake any further after all.

  JAKE

  Jeopardy is over and Wheel of Fortune is just beginning. Pete is sitting on one end of the sofa and Katie is curled up on the other end, with her thumb in her mouth. Jake would like to sit on the sofa too, but he doesn’t want to have to get that close to his father. Still, if he sits on any of the other chairs in the room, he won’t be able to see the TV at all.

  He doesn’t know what his father is doing in his space in the first place. Pete used to yell at Katie and him for watching game shows when they could be reading or doing something else that he considered constructive. And now here he is, watching them himself every night. Jake doesn’t get it.

  He decides that he shouldn’t deprive himself just because his father is there and plops down on the sofa, as close to Katie as possible. Pete swings
his eyes from the TV to give him a look. “What?” Jake asks.

  “Can’t you just ease yourself into a chair? Do you have to collapse on it and disturb everyone else?”

  “It was an accident,” Jake says.

  “An accident,” Pete repeats.

  Jake looks at his sister. Her eyes are glued to the TV. She’s not disturbed. She collapses on chairs herself, but she doesn’t get yelled at. “You don’t yell at Katie when she jumps on the furniture,” he declares.

  Pete sighs. “Can’t you just say you’re sorry? Does everything have to be an issue?”

  “You’re making it an issue. All I did was sit down.”

  “You didn’t just sit down. That’s the problem. You threw yourself down.”

  “Well, excuse me for living.” Jake slithers off the sofa, exaggeratedly, and settles himself on the carpet, alongside Simon, who is asleep.

  “Move your head. I can’t see,” Katie says.

  Pete sighs again. Then he says, “Come on back here, Jake.”

  Jake doesn’t move. He wants an apology. The last of the three contestants is introducing himself, saying that he’s a troubleshooter. Jake doesn’t know what that is. He’d like to know, but he doesn’t want to ask his father. “Jake,” Pete says. Then, “Okay, you want to be angry with me because I asked you not to collapse on the sofa? Fine. Be a joker.”

  That’s something else that Jake would like to ask his father about. Whenever he gets mad at him lately, he calls him a joker. Jake doesn’t know whether he means just a joker, a guy who jokes around all the time, or the Joker, from the Batman movie. But every time his father calls him that, it’s because they’re having a fight, so Jake never gets to ask him.

  A troubleshooter. That must be someone who shoots down trouble, who goes into a company and finds out what’s wrong with it and tells the boss how to solve all the problems. The troubleshooter spins the wheel. He gets a Bankrupt and the spin passes. But Jake stops paying attention. He imagines himself as a troubleshooter, sees himself carrying a kind of gun-like vacuum cleaner like the Ghostbusters have. He imagines aiming it at his father, sucking him into the attached tank. If his father wasn’t always so mean to him, there wouldn’t be any trouble.

  Well, of course, his mother is trouble too. He’d like to suck her up into the tank along with his father. He thinks of her as a hamster, because she is always doing something. Now she is in the kitchen cutting their old wool clothes into strips so that she can make a braided rug. She can never just go out to the store and buy things like all the other mothers. She has to make everything. Then when you ask her something, she’s too busy making things to really listen. She says she’s listening, but she keeps her eyes on whatever it is that she is making out of stuff that should have been trashed to begin with. Jake knows it’s because she’s sad. And he hates her for being sad, even though it’s his fault.

  Jake wishes he had someone to talk to about his parents. He wishes he could tell someone what he did to make his mother so sad. He imagines going into his guidance counselor’s office and saying to him, “I have a terrible secret. When I was very little, I killed my sister.” But the look he imagines appearing on his guidance counselor’s face is too terrible. He can see him rising up out of his chair, taller than he used to be, angry, planting his palms on his desk. He hears himself saying, “But Mr. Rizzo, it was an accident! We were just playing in the living room. Every time she stood up, I would poke her with one finger. Then she would laugh and fall down. The more I did it, the harder she laughed. It was just a game. She was a year older than me. She could have knocked me down just as easily!

  “Mom came out of the kitchen and told me to stop. I don’t know if I heard her or not over the sound of Maddy’s laughing. I was laughing too. I was almost dizzy from laughing so much. I might not have even heard Mom. I know I saw her, but I was laughing so hard that she was just a blur standing in the doorway with a dish towel in her hand. Really, I remember the dish towel the best.”

  “The dish towel?” Mr. Rizzo asks, his snarled lips quivering.

  Jake imagines sitting down at this point, and waiting until Mr. Rizzo sits down again too before going on. He can see Mr. Rizzo tapping his fingertips on the desk, looking at the telephone, wondering whether he should call in some other people, Jake’s teachers maybe, to hear all this. “The reason I remember the dish towel,” Jake continues, “is because I was the one who picked it out. It had roosters on it. Their feathers were purple and blue, the same purple and blue that is on the flowers on the wallpaper above the paneling in the kitchen. Mom and Maddy and I had been looking at some other dish towels in the store when I saw the rooster one. This was back in the days when we used to go out to the stores, before Mom turned into a hamster. And even though I was really little, I realized that it matched our wallpaper. And I knew Mom liked things to match back then. And also I really liked roosters back then. So I said, ‘Buy this one.’ And Mom said, ‘Oh, you’re so smart. It’s perfect.’

  “So we bought it, and whenever I saw Mom using it, I was proud of myself all over again.”

  “You’re digressing, Mr. Arroway. Your mother, you said, was a blur in the—”

  “Yeah. She was a blur in the doorway, holding the rooster dish towel. And Maddy and I were laughing and playing near the fireplace. Then Maddy hit her head on one of the fireplace stones and her laughing stopped. That’s what I remember.”

  “Go on. What next?”

  “Next, Mom and I waited for Maddy to cry. It didn’t seem like she hit her head that hard. We thought she would cry like she always did when she fell down. Mom said, ‘Cry, Maddy, cry.’ Then the next thing I knew, the dish towel was on the floor and Mom was holding Maddy in her arms and screaming, ‘Cry, Maddy, cry!’ I still didn’t know that Maddy wasn’t going to start crying. I was staring at the dish towel and wishing that it had fallen with the rooster side up instead of down. With the rooster side down, it looked just like any of the other dish towels in the house. I wanted to go and turn it over. I didn’t know that people could just stop being.

  “Then the crying came, but it was Mom, not Maddy. She cried so loud that my ears started to hurt. She collapsed on the floor and cried and cried and rocked back and forth with Maddy in her arms. She rocked so hard she looked like she was sitting in a rocking chair.

  “I don’t know if I went up by myself or if Mom took me up, but the next thing I remember is that I was up in my room with my door opened a crack. My bed still had a guard rail on it then. I could still hear Mom crying, sometimes soft and sometimes so loud that it was more like growling than crying. I imagined that she was still rocking too.

  “Later, Mom came into my room. Her face was white. I remember thinking that she looked like the Snow Queen that she always read me about. Her eyes were very red and they didn’t really focus on anything—not even when she sat down on my bed and started sweeping my hair off my forehead with her hand. We sat quietly for a long, long time. She looked so calm. I thought everything was okay after all because of how calm she looked. Finally she spoke. Her words were very soft. I remember that she had to keep stopping to breathe while she was talking. She said, ‘Jake, you didn’t push Maddy. You had been pushing her, but then she fell back by herself after you stopped. She just plain fell.’ Then she was quiet again.

  “Later we heard Dad come in downstairs. He called Mom’s name. She got up off the bed so gently that the springs didn’t even make a sound. She closed my door, but I could still hear downstairs. First I heard her talking, then Dad talking, then silence, then screaming and crying all over again.

  “Other people came to the house. Grandma and Poppie came with Aunt Sherri. Aunt Sherri’s crying was even worse than Mom’s.

  “When I came downstairs again, Grandma and Poppie and Aunt Sherri were gone. Mom and Dad were in the living room with Jeff, this doctor friend of Dad’s who lives down the road from us. Mom was laying on the sofa and Jeff was sitting next to her on the edge of it. He asked her how she fe
lt. Her answer was a whisper. Dad was sitting on the rocker smoking a cigarette. I’d never seen him smoke before. Ashes were falling on his pants. When he saw me, he said, ‘Were you there?’ I understood what he was talking about, but I didn’t understand why he was asking me if I was there because I figured Mom would have already told him. I nodded. He said, ‘What happened?’ With the corner of my eye I saw Mom get up on one elbow to see how I would answer. I said, ‘She just plain fell.’ Mom laid back down again. Dad put out his cigarette and lit up another one. Then Jeff put his things away in his black bag and got ready to go.”

  “This is quite a secret, young man.”

  “Well, actually, my secret isn’t that I killed my sister. That’s not a secret because Mom knows it too. My secret is that I’m the only one who knows that I know that I killed my sister.”

  “But I know now. And I’ll have to tell some others. Everyone will have to know.”

  “No, you can’t do that!”

  “PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS!”

  Jake gasps and turns to look at his father. But Pete is only staring at the TV, guessing the answer to the first puzzle. Jake glances at the TV in time to see the troubleshooter buy a vowel, a ‘u.’ “Put your money where your mouth is,” the troubleshooter guesses. Everyone applauds him. Jake turns to look at his father again, who is smiling just like the troubleshooter. You’d think he was the one who was going to win all the prizes.

  Mr. Rizzo is out. It will have to be someone else, someone who won’t tell, someone who will just listen. Maybe a woman. Jake wishes his grandmother hadn’t died. She wouldn’t have told anyone; she hardly ever talked. And when she did, it was mostly about stuff she was cooking or the weather or to remind you to button up because it was cold outside. He could tell his grandfather. No one would ever get it out of him.