Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘Sure, I know. Josh was nice.’

  ‘“Don’t you dare come help in the kitchen,” she says. “You stay there and keep what’ s-his-name, this creep, company.” Rodge. But she’d left a plate and I forget what I wanted to ask her, but I picked up this plate and started off for the kitchen. She’d just switched on her coffee grinder – we could hear it from the table; I went through the swing door, and there was the coffee grinder screaming away empty, and there was Jeanie, spooning instant coffee into eight cups. Jesus. I mean, who’s she kidding? I guess it’s part of the sickness. All she ever talks about is how poor she is. They’ve got a yacht now. Not a big one, but, Christ, a yacht is a yacht. They charter it out when they’re not using it. And the complaints about how hard it is to juggle all your taxes legally, their little place in the country, the apartment they’re thinking of buying – they can rent that out, too; I should be so poor. Well. Actually, what really bothered me was Joshua.’

  ‘Fat and defeated?’

  ‘A-1 physical shape and thinks he should be running the country. Pontificating. Right on the edge of becoming a bore. He should have come out of the closet years ago like everybody else, and then he wouldn’t have to do all that compensating.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been an easy thing to take on, somebody like Jeanie. She works so hard, she really does. That’s part of the trouble. She can’t let up. And he’s a bit incompetent. He’s probably just going around with somebody twenty years younger and it’s given him that little extra hint of …’ She thought back to that time with Fred, ‘… of fraudulent righteousness,’ she said. ‘Was he praising her cooking and giving her little satisfied score-marks for doing things or saying things?’

  Estelle poured the coffee and sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it specially, but he was. Not for her cooking, of course. That’s still TV dinner with kitchen sherry and garlic poured all over it. You really think that’s a sign?’

  ‘Oh, no, not necessarily. It just shows a general attitude. I only noticed it with Fred because he wasn’t that way before. Or after. But some men are like that all the time, aren’t they?’

  ‘Josh wasn’t that way before.’

  ‘Or it could be caused by something else. He might just be unhappy. Or she might be seeing somebody else.’

  ‘Oh, not her. Him, maybe.’

  ‘I know you don’t think she ever knew, but maybe she did know all along. Married couples are linked to each other by such deep loyalties. You can’t tell. Even when they hate each other, sometimes. I wouldn’t count on either of them knowing or not knowing anything. Or how much they care.’

  ‘It could have been something else, of course. They’re up to their necks in business deals at the moment. Maybe they’re doing something fishy. I just had a feeling. Maybe he’s done something on his own, something just over the line, so he thinks he’s been a hot-shot wheeler-dealer and that’s what makes him go around looking so conceited. And furtive.’

  ‘I doubt it, Estelle. His only importance comes through her. He wouldn’t be able to pull a fast one by himself.’

  ‘Well, at this point, I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s changed a lot since you knew them.’

  ‘He must have been pontificating like crazy.’

  ‘OK, so you think I’m exaggerating. But he was. And I was also pretty annoyed about being saddled with some dolt like that Rodge. So dim, he couldn’t even size up two people like Jeanie and Josh. I don’t know where they dig them up.’

  ‘Maybe they phone one of those dating clubs.’

  Estelle laughed. She told Dorothy a story she had heard at the studio about an extra who had been found dead in her apartment and the only clue anyone could think of was that she used to meet a lot of people through one of those places like Dateline. Dorothy said that she wouldn’t be surprised; she had read a story in the papers the other day about a dating service that had turned out to be a big blackmail racket. Yes, Estelle said, and then there were the new religions and the horoscope experts and heaven knew what-all these days; it was getting so everything was as crooked as the real estate business. Dorothy said sure, but then it always was, wasn’t it, and when she started to get really upset about everything, she just went out into her garden and planted something or pulled up weeds. Otherwise there was no end to it.

  They talked about Estelle’s two men, whom Dorothy referred to as friends or boyfriends, and Estelle gloatingly as lovers. They were named Charlie and Stan and they both wanted to marry Estelle. So far, neither one knew that the other was a real lover, only perhaps a threat. But Estelle had had enough of marriage. Her work at the studios was very well paid and full of variety and interest. She had met both Charlie and Stan through her job. They were younger than she was, nor were they the only men to be interested.

  Dorothy thought Estelle was looking happy and full of vitality. The glow of health, she thought. like a lighted candle. And what was the opposite? She remembered what Estelle had looked like before and during the divorce. It had coincided with the time of Fred’s unfaithfulness. There had been many afternoons when they had sat in Estelle’s kitchen and just said, ‘The bastards‚’ over and over again. Dorothy had been afraid Estelle might become an alcoholic. ‘Don’t have another drink‚’ she would say. ‘Talk about it instead.’

  She accepted a second cup of coffee, first trying to persuade Estelle to add some water to it. Estelle was outraged. She declared that it would kill the taste.

  ‘Then don’t fill it up. Honestly, Estelle.’

  ‘Honestly yourself.’

  ‘I don’t know why it doesn’t have any effect on you. I love it, but two cups make me feel dizzy. And like my scalp might suddenly rise up and fly away. Then there’s something over here – here, is that where the liver is?’

  ‘Dorothy, that’s where the imagination is.’

  They talked about Estelle’s children, Sandra and Joey; and about Dorothy’s plants and vegetables. Her real pride was the collection of miniature fruit trees, although she had also recently succeeded in growing apple cucumbers under glass, a feat which had delighted her at the time, and about which she was still rather pleased. They did not talk about divorce.

  For a long while after her own divorce, Estelle had strongly urged Dorothy to follow suit. She had been particularly persistent, Dorothy thought, because she wanted the companionship of a similar destiny, as newly married women want all their friends to be married, too. Or women newly become mothers, Dorothy remembered, who urge motherhood on others.

  Estelle still once in a while threw out a hint about divorce, but she had really given up on Dorothy. She gave up on the day when Dorothy, worn out, had asked her to stop and explained, ‘I think we’re too unhappy to get a divorce.’

  During those days there were times when Dorothy would lean her head against the wall and seem to herself to be no longer living because no longer a part of any world in which love was possible. And she had asked herself: was religion really the only thing that kept people together, wrongly believing bad things will happen after death? No, they all happen before. Especially divorce.

  All at once she noticed the time and was so flustered that she almost forgot to take her package of meat out of Estelle’s icebox when she left. They promised to meet on the fourteenth for the fashion show.

  *

  She was sweating when she got back. It was later than she had thought and she started mixing the sauce before anything else. She turned on the radio automatically between moves from stove to icebox to sink, and then sprinted to the bedroom to change her clothes and put some make-up on. As she ran back into the kitchen, snatching up the apron and tying it in back, a voice from the radio was saying: Police again advise residents in the area to be on the lookout for this highly dangerous animal.

  Dorothy shook out and refolded her kitchen scarf to go over her head and keep her hair from picking up the garlic and onion smells. The radio played Chopin. She heard the front door closin
g, and Fred’s voice.

  From then on, things went quickly and she had to turn off the music to guard against any outside distraction. She kept her thoughts running – first this, then that, and at the same time such-and-such, and don’t forget the pinch of thyme – and her hands moving. It was like some sort of test or race. Perhaps, like her, laboratory rats took a pride in solving the puzzles scientists set them. The pleasures of obsession. Still, how else was it possible to do anything in a short space of time? The trouble was, that you couldn’t becalm your mind completely because if you weren’t careful, you’d forget to turn off the stove.

  She was into the living-room to greet Art Gruber, and out again with such speed that she might have been one of the mechanical weather-people in a child’s snow-globe or a figure on a medieval clock, who zooms across a lower balcony as the face shows the hands on the hour. Back in the kitchen again, she had all the salad ingredients out, chopping up carrots and celery with her favourite sharp vegetable knife, had put some potato chips and nuts in bowls and just slid some cheese on crackers under the grill. Then she raced for the bathroom in the spare room.

  She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen, when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

  She stopped before she knew she had stopped, and looked, without realizing that she was taking anything in. She was as surprised and shocked as if she had heard an explosion and seen her own shattered legs go flying across the floor. There was a space between him and the place where she was standing; it was like a gap in time. She saw how slowly everything was happening.

  She felt that he was frowning at her, but he hadn’t moved yet. Her mouth was slightly open – she could feel that – and waves of horripilation fled across her skin. A flash of heat or ice sped up her backbone and neck and over her scalp so that her hair really did seem to lift up. And her stomach hurt.

  Then, swimming among all the startlingly released fragrances of her shock and terror, she caught the slight scent of burning, which warned her about the toast. That was the reason why she had been rushing in the first place. And without thinking, she darted forward, grabbed a potholder, turned the gas off, dumped the little pieces of toast on to the plate that had been set out for them, and slid the grill tray back into the stove.

  The creature made a growling noise and she came to her senses. She took a step backwards. The growling increased. She took another step and bumped into the table. At the far end of the table lay the celery, carrots and tomatoes, the head of lettuce and her favourite sharp knife, which would cut through anything just like a razor.

  She reached out her hand slowly; slowly she reached farther forward. She kept her eyes fixed on his. His eyes were huge and dark, seeming much larger than the eyes of a human being, and extremely deep. His head was quite like the head of a frog, but rounder, and the mouth was smaller and more centred in the face, like a human mouth. Only the nose was very flat, almost not there, and the forehead bulged up in two creases. The hands and feet were webbed, but not very far up, in fact only just noticeably, and as for the rest of the body, he was exactly like a man – a well-built large man – except that he was a dark spotted green-brown in colour and had no hair anywhere. And his ears were unusually small, set low down and rounded.

  She stretched way out across the table, took her eyes off his for an instant and picked up the long stalk of celery next to the knife. The growling stopped. She took a step forward slowly, and held out the celery in front of her.

  He too stepped forward and put his hand out. His fingers closed around the celery. She let go of her end. She stayed standing where she was and watched as he ate the stalk with all the leaves. Then she turned and picked up another one and handed it forward. This time he held on to her hand and touched it all over with both of his before he took the celery from her. The touch of his hands was warm and dry, but somehow more muscular than that of a human hand. Dorothy found it pleasant. He opened his mouth, and the lips, as though with some difficulty, shaped words.

  ‘Thank you‚’ he said.

  Dorothy managed to answer, ‘You’re welcome‚’ and registered the fact that he had a bit of a foreign accent.

  ‘I need help‚’ he said.

  She thought: you need help, my God, oh my God, you need help? You need help and so do I.

  ‘Help me‚’ he said. ‘They will kill me. I have suffered so much already.’

  She looked deeply into his eyes and thought: of course he has suffered, not being like other people, and now the police after him, and who knows what horrible experiments they did on him?

  ‘All right‚’ she told him. ‘But wait here first, just a minute.’

  She picked up the tray of toasted cheese, nuts and potato chips, and hurried into the living-room. Art gave her a perfunctory smile, but Fred didn’t even look up, just muttered, ‘Thanks, Dotty‚’ and went on shuffling some papers they were looking at.

  She ran back through the swing door and found the frogman eating up all her salad.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘What else do you like to eat?’

  ‘Any vegetables‚’ he said. He pronounced all the syllables of ‘vegetable’, but she had met one or two ordinary Americans who said the word that way.

  ‘Fruit?’

  ‘Some fruit. Not too …’ He waved his large hand and ended, ‘that sharp taste, not that.’

  ‘Not too acid? What about tomatoes?’ She had the icebox door open and was rummaging around, putting objects in a bowl. Then she suddenly thought of the spaghetti and quickly threw some into a pot to give him before the rest of them had their dinner. While it cooked, he ate everything else, though she managed to rescue some of the salad ingredients.

  She gave him spaghetti in a bowl. As she was about to spread butter on it, he growled. She got some margarine out of the icebox and used that instead. He took her wrist and leaned forward, moving his face up close to the margarine and sniffing it. Then he let go. She dropped a square of margarine into the spaghetti and swished it around until it melted. Then she sprinkled some herbs and salt on the top. He looked into the bowl, breathed in again, and seemed to be smiling. Then he picked up the bowl, held it above his face, and tipped it downwards, sucking up and chewing the spaghetti as it slipped down out of the bowl. It was a skilful performance, Dorothy thought, and rather a sensible way to eat spaghetti, but it made a lot of noise.

  ‘I like that‚’ he said when he had finished.

  ‘Was it enough?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Look‚’ she said, gesturing around her and towards the swing door into the living-room, ‘I’ve got to hide you. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Come with me.’ She handed him the bowl of vegetables he hadn’t finished yet, and hurried away to the door, the hall, and into the spare room.

  ‘You’ll have to stay here. It’s all right as long as you’re quiet. I’ll look in late tonight if I can, but probably not till early tomorrow. We’ll have to plan something. There’s a bed … um … and bathroom?’

  He seemed to know that she was wondering if he knew what they were for and how to use them.

  ‘Yes, just like the Institute‚’ he said.

  She showed him where all the lights were, put out some towels and sheets, and hesitated for a moment as she realized that there wasn’t time to make up the bed. This too he seemed to sense, and waved it away with his hand. Then he caught both her hands in his and held them tenderly to his face. She was moved. She patted him cautiously on the back and said it was all right, and she’d see him in the morning.

  *

  In the morning, she really thought she might have dreamt everything. She made breakfast for Fred and herself, looked at the paper, too
k out the section with the crossword puzzle, and handed Fred the rest of the paper on the doorstep. She watched him drive off in a taxi, then she went from the kitchen into the little hallway and through to the guest room.

  The frogman was still there, sitting on the corner of the bed, looking towards her. The sheets were made up on the bed. She took a step in. He stood up, huge.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked uncertainly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You slept?’ He nodded. ‘Are you hungry? I’ll fix you some breakfast.’ She led the way back to the kitchen. Halfway there, she stopped in surprise. The frame on the hall window-ledge, where she had been growing the prize apple cucumbers, was empty.

  From behind her, he said, ‘Was it all right to eat the food? It was so long since I had food. Were you saving it?’

  ‘No, that’s all right‚’ she said. After all, it was food, and that was what food was for. ‘I just hadn’t expected to see it empty.’

  ‘I ate one. That was so good. I kept eating.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked them.’

  ‘Very good. Excellent. I have never had this vegetable before. Are there more?’

  ‘No, that’s why I was growing them myself. But I can get you something like them. I’ll buy in cucumbers when I go out shopping.’

  She cooked him some more spaghetti and tried a small amount of rice with soy sauce, which he liked very much. Once again, he ate the spaghetti by holding the plate up and letting all the contents fall slowly into his open mouth.

  ‘My name is Dorothy‚’ she said.

  ‘My name is Larry.’

  ‘On the radio they said your name was Aquarius.’

  ‘That was what the professor named me when they caught me. But I couldn’t pronounce it. Now I can, but now I’m used to being called Larry.’

  ‘What are you called in your own language?’ Dorothy asked.