Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘I still think your idea about phoning up central casting is a pretty good one.’

  ‘And if you had one of those dresses, you could probably hide him under it. Weren’t they something? It would be like wearing another personality, a dress like that.’

  ‘I don’t think I could take any more personality. Maybe I should forget about the dress. Anyway, it would only look right if you had the right hairdo. You’d need one of those powdered wigs.’

  ‘They were pretty. They didn’t look as stiff as the ones in the pictures. But I can’t stand the idea of something pressing on my head like that. I don’t know how actresses and dancers can wear wigs all the time.’

  ‘Have a drink, Dorothy. Don’t let me drink alone.’

  ‘So there’ll be two drunks instead of one.’

  ‘Who said anything about drunk? Just a couple of –’

  Dorothy stood up. ‘Estelle,’ she said, ‘you don’t need it. You don’t need it.’

  Estelle sighed. She put the bottle back in the cupboard. Dorothy picked up her car keys and purse. They walked to the door.

  ‘In five years, you’ll laugh about it,’ Dorothy said.

  ‘Sure. But now now.’

  ‘Just ask yourself if you want to go on seeing them or not. And then act according to that. OK?’

  ‘Thanks, Dotty.’

  ‘Any time. Thanks for the show. You still want to do that matinée?’

  ‘I don’t know. I may have to take Sandra in for an interview. I just don’t know the day yet. Call me up.’

  Dorothy changed direction on the way to the main road. She drove back to town and then went on to the museum gardens, parked the car and walked around, looking at the trees and flowers. There were two old women being pushed in wheelchairs by uniformed nurses. Me, one day, she thought. And between now and then, nothing that can be done to avoid it, except an earlier death. But the gardens were pleasant. The grass in particular was luxuriantly green and well kept. She wondered if Larry would like to come here. There was no fence, which meant that they could get in easily, but also that other people could, too. They might run into a gang of beer-drinking rowdies with switchblades. It was probably better to stick to the beach and maybe that garden with the bamboo grove.

  She drove home, to find Fred there early. He said, ‘I’ve got to go out to a meeting.’ She nodded. On the stairs he turned. ‘What have you got in that bag?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, more avocados, of course‚’ she said, as if joking, and went through the door into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she heard him running down the stairs. He called out a goodbye and the front door slammed. Suddenly she went back to the living-room and looked out the window. She saw him getting into a car parked at the kerb. No one else was in the car; he must have hired it.

  She had an early, leisurely dinner with Larry. They ate in the kitchen and listened to some music turned down low. The programme finished while they were still eating, so Dorothy switched it off and afterwards they talked. She told him about the fashion show and about Estelle meeting Charlie and Stan.

  He said, ‘Is this important?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just something that happened today, so it’s part of my life to talk about.’

  ‘Your friend Estelle thought it was very important?’

  ‘Yes, she certainly did. She was upset. Not as much as she sounded, but quite a lot.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, launching Dorothy into an explanation of the mating habits of human beings. She wasn’t even sure that she was right about half her pronouncements. Every time Larry asked a question, she felt less sure. They seemed to be sensible questions, and she wondered why she had never thought of them herself. Then, at one point, he said, ‘For us, it’s easier. Only the female is wanting and jealous and so on during mating, and the one she wants is the strong one. If you aren’t strong, she stops wanting you and there is no mating.’

  ‘But would you go to a different female if you couldn’t get the one you wanted?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And would you be as happy with her as you would have been with the first one?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it important?’

  Dorothy was nonplussed. He also said, ‘When we want something, it’s true. We don’t want something we can’t have and not like the thing we get instead. The thing you want is the thing you have, isn’t it?’

  ‘No‚’ Dorothy said. ‘Not at all. You should know that. What about prison? You were in one. And there are all kinds of prisons in the world. Everywhere.’

  Larry stood up, pushed his chair in to the table, and did the strange, contorted movements again, asking ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told you. Is it a joke?’

  ‘I don’t know either, that’s why I’m asking you. I saw it on TV.’

  ‘Oh, no wonder. Well, I’ll watch with you. Maybe I can catch it on another day.’ She tried to establish a time for the programme. Larry said he thought that it was an ad of some kind.

  As soon as it grew dark, Dorothy drove them out in the car. They went to the beach again and swam, and talked. She told Larry about the museum park and he said that it sounded nice. Dorothy was sorry that she had brought the subject up.

  ‘It’s much too dangerous. If anything happened, we’d be too far away from the car.’

  ‘Let’s go see.’

  ‘All right, I’ll drive past. But that’s all. We won’t get out of the car.’

  She skirted the museum grounds on one side and across the front. Shadows of palm trees hung patterned across the way in front of them as Dorothy turned the wheel again. Larry leaned out of the window, breathing in.

  ‘At the back, the lawns slope down to the sea. It’s a beautiful view. I don’t know how they manage to keep the grass and gardens so healthy with the salt air.’

  ‘Can we stop here, please?’

  She pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, and turned off the gas. From a distance they could hear the ocean, almost seeming to echo or imitate the sound of cars on the roads nearby. There was a tiny chirping of insects and the warm air was made fresh by night gardens.

  ‘We can walk a little‚’ Larry stated. He opened his door. Dorothy reached back, throwing her arm around his neck and shoulders.

  ‘Please‚’ she said. ‘I’m nervous about it.’ He detached her arm, got out, shut the door softly, and came around to her side. ‘You come, too‚’ he said.

  She followed him on to the immense stage of grass where the silhouetted trees and bushes leaned out into the air like the shapes of boats in a harbour. Dorothy wanted to dodge from one protecting shadow to the next, but Larry pulled her along into the open, holding her by the hand and carrying his sandals in his other hand.

  He made her prowl around the grounds for a full twenty minutes, asking her questions about the museum when she thought it would be safer not to talk. Once, a car turned the corner on the road and Dorothy pulled her hand away and jumped behind a large bush as the headlights arched across the road. Larry came after her, unhurried, and saying, ‘The lights would not shine this way. Or is it some other reason you’re hiding?’

  ‘No, that was the reason.’

  He made her take one more turn around the palm avenue, and then agreed to go back to the car. He said, ‘I like this place.’

  ‘I do too, very much. But I think we’ve been damn lucky not to run into anybody. Please, let’s not take any more chances like this, Larry.’

  ‘You are too frightened. It spoils your enjoyment.’

  ‘Larry, you’re all I’ve got‚’ she said.

  He spread his arms out away from the car to take in the earth and sky all around, and said, ‘You’ve got all this. And you live here. It’s your home.’

  Dorothy sat behind the wheel and drove silently for about five minutes. Then she tried to explain to Larry that ‘all this’ wasn’t much good without another person to share it with. He said that peopl
e were everywhere, there were millions of them; she said that people were all different and you had to find the ones who fitted with you. He said that he didn’t understand that. How were people different? ‘Inside‚’ she said, which mystified him, and when she asked if all the people where he came from were exactly the same, he said yes. When she told him that she couldn’t believe it, he made a further statement: ‘We all do the same things, so we are the same. Here you all do different things.’

  Dorothy thought about that. She said, ‘If that were really true, men would be more different from other men than women from other women, because men’s jobs are very varied, while most women do the same things. But it isn’t true – women differ from each other just as much as men do. Do you think we could trust some other people to help us?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly.

  ‘If they were other housewives like me? Just like me?’

  ‘No. You are right. It’s perhaps more complicated than I thought at first.’

  ‘And you don’t really mean where you come from everyone is just like you.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That part’s true.’

  *

  Fred asked Dorothy to come to an office party the next week. That was unusual enough, because he himself never liked that kind of thing. They sat on the sidelines in someone’s house, with plates balanced on their knees. People were dancing to records and everyone said how nice it was to meet again. It was a very dull party. A few days later, he wanted to take out a visiting client and his wife, and have Dorothy come along. They went to a good seafood restaurant and had a pleasant evening. It was almost like old times. As they were leaving, Dorothy noticed the Cranstons sitting down at a special large table set for about twenty people. Jeanie Cranston jumped out of her seat to say what a surprise, and they must get together more often. Dorothy said yes, of course, but she knew they wouldn’t. For years now they had really only been friends through Estelle. Dorothy took a quick look at the crowd they were with: loud, overdressed, yelling at each other across the table. Joshua looked the way Estelle had described him – smug, pompous and somehow not right.

  The next morning before lunch, while Larry was peeling potatoes with her, Dorothy had a telephone call from Estelle. It was a distress call. She sounded drunk, and though what she seemed to be talking about was some dangerous characters her daughter Sandra was keeping company with, Dorothy was sure that the real trouble had to do with Charlie and Stan. She said she’d drop over in the afternoon.

  ‘Start gargling with Listerine‚’ she added, ‘and be careful not to swallow any, because if you’re drunk when I get there, I’m turning right around and going home again. I might even phone up Charlie and Stan and tell them about each other.’

  Estelle screeched with laughter and hung up.

  Larry helped to start off a new crop of apple cucumbers, he made the salad for lunch, and did the dusting while Dorothy vacuumed. Then he helped her to clean the silver – what there was of it – which she always forgot until she caught sight of a blackening cream jug in the corner of the top cupboard or a ladle at the side of the middle drawer.

  She looked over to where he was, seated at the other end of the kitchen table in the light which, since his arrival, she had blocked by curtains because of his sensitive eyes. He concentrated on polishing spoons with a silver cloth: six teaspoons from a great-aunt. One leg was slung over the other, which would have looked strange enough, but he was also wearing a flowered apron fastened around his waist, and it contrasted stunningly with his large, muscular green body, his nobly massive head. Dorothy thought he looked, as always, wonderful. And his hands, in spite of their size and strength, were nimble and delicate in all their movements. He said that he enjoyed housework. He was good at it, and found it interesting. It was so different from anything he had known before: the hands had to be kept in constant motion, while the rest of the body remained more or less still.

  They were lying in bed and watching television that afternoon, when Larry said sharply, ‘Look!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the screen.’

  ‘Oh, it’s an ad for a dance company.’

  ‘But what is it? Look.’

  ‘It’s somebody called Merce Cunningham. You were right – it’s an ad, for a dance programme coming up next week. It’s a series. He has a dance company of his own.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Dancing.’

  ‘No, no, no‚’ Larry said, getting out of bed, standing on the floor, and doing the strange motions he had been doing for days now. Suddenly Dorothy realized that he was giving a perfect imitation of the dance.

  ‘That’s his dance‚’ she said.

  ‘But what is it? What does it do?’

  ‘I don’t think it does anything. It expresses some emotion or idea, or gives an impression of an event. It makes variations with patterns. Do you like it?’

  ‘I don’t understand it‚’ he said, getting back into bed.

  ‘It’s too bad I can’t take you to see things. You should see some classical ballet, then I could try to explain from there.’

  ‘I’ve seen it‚’ Larry said. ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘Really? You liked it?’

  ‘Yes, very nice. Full of music.’

  ‘So is this.’

  ‘Not the same.’

  ‘No‚’ Dorothy said. Most of the time, if she couldn’t explain something to him straight away, he didn’t push it. The last time she’d been stuck was when he said he didn’t understand ‘radical chic’.

  Later in the afternoon, she drove over to Estelle’s. Just before she rang the bell, she had a feeling that no one was at home. She rang three times. No answer. She walked around to the back and peeked into the kitchen. Estelle was sitting down at one side of the booth-and-table across from the stove, and Sandra was in the middle of the room, shouting. Dorothy could hear her right through the window: ‘– Stupid old … never … bitch … all the time …’

  Dorothy rapped on the glass with her car keys. Sandra looked up, her face heavy, mask-like and intent. Then she disappeared. Next to Dorothy the kitchen door was flung open.

  She walked in. Sandra was just going out the door that led to the dining-room. Estelle hadn’t moved Dorothy sat down at the other side of the table.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘What?’ Estelle asked.

  ‘The hangover.’

  ‘I’ve got a hangover, all right. I’ve got a hangover from living forty-four long years.’

  ‘How old is Sandra now, anyway? I always forget. Is she fifteen?’

  ‘Sixteen. They’re all doing it at twelve now. She’s been on the pill for two years. Well, I told you.’

  ‘But she’s going through phases very fast. She’ll probably get through a lot of unsuitable people before she settles down.’

  ‘Unsuitable,’ Estelle said.

  ‘Isn’t it better to have her experiment around than go all starry-eyed and get into a marriage that’s going to break up in a couple of years? Then she’d be back where she is now, except maybe she’d have a child to bring up, too.’

  ‘If she were married, at least it might prove he loved her.’

  ‘Oh, Estelle. Do you love Stan, or Charlie?’

  ‘She’s trying to get back at me through this.’

  ‘Maybe‚’ Dorothy sighed. She waited for Estelle to launch into explanation or self-justification, but she just sat slumped against the wall.

  After a long while, Estelle said, ‘What a mess. I’m sorry I got you out here. I’m not very good company and I don’t really know what to do about this. I don’t want her to get hurt, but if I give her her head, there could be other people who get hurt.’

  ‘Who is this boy?’

  ‘A man. Our age.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Oh, yes. You’re beginning to see now.’

  ‘I guess we’re lucky it isn’t Stan or
Charlie. Or is it?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Estelle rubbed her hands over her face and sat up straight. ‘Coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a little. And if I can’t help, let’s change the subject. Tell me about Joey.’

  ‘That isn’t changing the subject so much. He’s developed some kind of knight-errant complex about it. My sister must be pure type of thing. That’s how I found out. They’ve been fighting about it for days, till last evening it all came out what the trouble was.’

  After the first cup, Dorothy wanted to go, but it was just at that point that Estelle decided to tell a little more of the story about Sandra.

  ‘Have you seen this man?’ Dorothy asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Estelle went on to say that she didn’t know what to do, because every move she made was being misinterpreted by her daughter. She had the feeling that the girl was just waiting for her to put a foot wrong.

  ‘This man –’ Dorothy began.

  ‘The thing is, I’ve always tried to bring them up to compensate for the way I was brought up.’

  ‘Well, all mothers do that.’

  ‘And now it’s all paying off. What really kills me is this idea that a lot of it goes back to the divorce. Punishing me for it.’

  After the second cup of coffee, Dorothy got away. She was less worried about Estelle than when she had heard her voice over the telephone, but wasn’t very optimistic about how long she would stay sober. As long as things didn’t reach a crisis during the time when she would have to be driving Larry to safety, she ought to be able to deal with everything.

  Fred wasn’t home yet when she arrived. She went into the kitchen, looked in on Larry briefly, and as soon as she heard the car, walked into the living-room.

  ‘What now?’ he said, taking off his jacket. He put it over the back of a chair.

  ‘Talk. Our famous talk we were going to have. About Suzanne and the vacation, and everything.’

  ‘I’ve got to go out. Can’t we do all that later?’

  ‘It’s always later. One day it’s going to be too late.’

  He looked at her over his shoulder, but said nothing. She thought: he was going to say, ‘It’s already too late,’ but he changed his mind.