My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  At the corner where we separated, Preston stood a moment or two.

  “It ’s hopeless,” he said.

  “God, do you really think so?” I asked.

  “That ’s my honest opinion,” he said.

  He turned toward his house. I jogged a block or two, and then felt my stomach muscles. When I came to a maple with a low, straight branch, I ran and jumped up and swung from the branch, while a big green diesel bus rolled ponderously past, all its windows filled with tired faces that looked out at the street going by and at me hanging from the branch and smiling. I was doomed, but I was very likely charming.

  I ran in the front door of my house and called out, “Mother!

  Mother!”

  “What is it?” she answered. She was sitting on the screened porch, and I could see a little plume of cigarette smoke in the doorway. There was the faint mutter of a radio news program turned on low.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m home, that ’s all.”

  At the dinner table, I would try to disguise myself by slouching in my chair and thinking about my homework, but my mother and my sister always recognized me. “How was track today?” my sister would ask in a slightly amused way.

  “Fine,” I would say in a low voice.

  My mother and my sister would exchange glances. I must have

  seemed comic to them, stilted, and slightly absurd, like all males.

  Almost every evening, Sonny Bruster used to drive up to our house in his yellow convertible. The large car would glide to a stop at the curb, and Sonny would glance quickly at himself in the rear-view mirror, running his hand over his hair. Then he ’d climb out and brush his pants off, too occupied with his own shyness to notice the children playing on the block. But they would stop what they were doing and watch him.

  I would wait for him at the front door and let him in and lead him into the living room. I walked ahead of Sonny because I had noticed that he could not keep himself from looking up the stairs as we passed through the hallway, as if to conjure up my sister then and there with the intensity of his longing, and I hated to see him do this. I would sit in the high-backed yellow chair, and Sonny would settle himself on the couch

  16

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  and ask me about track, or if I’d picked a college yet. “You ought to think carefully about college,” he would say. “I think Princeton is more civilized than Yale.” His gentle, well-bred voice was carefully inexpressive. In his manner there was a touch of stiffness to remind you, and himself, that he was rich and if some disrespect was intended for him he wouldn’t necessarily put up with it. But I liked him. He treated me with great politeness, and I liked the idea of his being my brother-in-law, and I sometimes thought of the benefits that would fall to me if my sister married him.

  Then my sister would appear at the head of the stairs, dressed to go out, and Sonny would leap to his feet. “Are you ready?” he ’d cry, as if he had never dared hope she would be. My sister would hand him her coat, and with elaborate care he ’d hold it for her. It would be perhaps eight o’clock or a little after. The street lamps would be on, but looking pallid because it wasn’t quite dark. Usually, Sonny would open the car door for my sister, but sometimes, with a quick maneuver, she would forestall him; she would hurry the last few steps, open the door, and slip inside before he could lift his hand.

  Sonny was not the first rich boy who had loved my sister; he was the fourth or fifth. And in the other cases there had been scenes between my mother and sister in which my mother extolled the boy’s eligibility and my sister argued that she was too young to marry and didn’t want to stop having a good time yet. Each time she had won, and each time the boy had been sent packing, while my mother looked heartbroken and said my sister was throwing her chances away.

  With Sonny, the same thing seemed about to happen. My sister

  missed going out with a lot of boys instead of with just one. She complained once or twice that Sonny was jealous and spoiled. There were times when she seemed to like him very much, but there were other times when she would greet him blankly in the evening when she came downstairs, and he would be apologetic and fearful, and I could see that her disapproval was the thing he feared most in the world.

  My mother didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she hid her feelings.

  Then one night I was sitting in my room doing my homework and I heard my mother and sister come upstairs. They went into my sister’s room.

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  17

  “I think Sonny’s becoming very serious,” my mother said.

  “Sonny’s so short,” I heard my sister say. “He ’s not really interesting, either, Mother.”

  “He seems to be very fond of you,” my mother said.

  “He ’s no fun,” my sister said. “Mother, be careful! You’re brushing too hard! You’re hurting me!”

  I stopped trying to work, and listened.

  “Sonny’s a very intelligent boy,” my mother said. “He comes from

  a good family.”

  “I don’t care,” my sister said. “I don’t want to waste myself on him.”

  “Waste yourself ?” My mother laughed derisively. I got up and went to the door of my sister’s room. My sister was sitting at her dressing table, her hair shining like glass and her eyes closed. My mother was walking back and forth, gesturing with the hairbrush. “He ’s the one who’s throwing himself away,” she said. “Who do you think we are, anyway? We ’re nobodies.”

  “I’m pretty!” my sister objected angrily.

  My mother shrugged. “The woods are full of pretty girls. What ’s more, they’re full of pretty, rich girls. Now, Sonny’s a very nice boy—”

  “Leave me alone!” My sister pulled her hair up from her shoulders and held it in a soft mop on the top of her head. “Sonny’s a jerk! A jerk!”

  “He ’s nice-looking!” my mother cried.

  “Oh, what do you know about it?” my sister cried. “You’re old, for God ’s sake!”

  The air vibrated. My sister rose and looked at my mother, horri-

  fied at what she had said. She took her hands from her hair, and it fell tumbling to her shoulders, dry and pale and soft. “I don’t care,” she said suddenly, and brushed past me, and fled into the bathroom and locked the door. There was no further sound from her. The only trace of her in the house at that moment was the faint odor in her room of the flowery perfume she used that spring.

  “Oh, she ’s so foolish,” my mother said, and I saw that she was crying. “She doesn’t know what she ’s doing. . . . Why is she so foolish?”

  Then she put the hairbrush down and raised her hands to her cheeks and began to pinch them.

  18

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  I went back to my room and closed the door.

  When I came out again, an hour later, my mother was in bed reading a magazine; she looked as if she had been wounded in a dozen places. My sister sat in her room, in front of the mirror. Her hair streamed down the back of her neck and lay in touching, defenseless little curls on the towel she had over her shoulders. She was studying her reflection thoughtfully. (Are flowers vain? Are trees? Are they consumed with vanity during those days when they are in bloom?) She raised her finger and pressed it against her lower lip to see, I think, if she would be prettier if her lip, instead of being so smooth, had a slight break in the center as some girls’ did.

  Shortly after this, my mother, who was neither stupid nor cruel, suggested that my sister stop seeing Sonny for a while. “Until you make up your mind,” she said. “Otherwise you might break his heart, you know.

  Tell him you need some time to think. He ’ll understand. He ’ll think you’re grown-up and responsible.”

  Sonny vanished from our house. In the evenings now, after dinner, the three of us would sit on the screened porch. My sister would look up eagerly when the phone rang, but
the calls were never for her. None of her old boy friends knew she had stopped dating Sonny, and after a while, when the phone rang, she would compose her face and pretend she wasn’t interested, or she would say irritably, “Who can that be?”

  She began to answer the phone herself (she never had before, because it wasn’t good for a girl to seem too eager) and she would look sadly at herself in the hall mirror while she said, “Yes, Preston, he ’s here.”

  She tried to read. She ’d skim a few pages and then put the book down and gaze out through the screens at the night and the patches of light on the trees. She would listen with my mother to the comedians on the radio and laugh vaguely when my mother laughed. She picked on me.

  “Your posture ’s no good,” she ’d say. Or “Where do you learn your manners? Mother, he behaves like a zoot-suiter or something.” Another time, she said, “If I don’t make a good marriage, you’ll be in trouble.

  You’re too lazy to do anything on your own.” She grew more and more restless. Toying with her necklace, she broke the string, and the beads

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  19

  rolled all over the floor, and there was something frantic in the way she went about retrieving the small rolling bits of glitter. It occurred to me that she didn’t know what she was doing; she was not really as sure of everything as she seemed. It was a painfully difficult thought to arrive at, and it clung to me. Why hadn’t I realized it before? Also, she sort of hated me, it seemed to me. I had never noticed that before, either. How could I have been so wrong, I wondered. Knowing how wrong I had

  been about this, I felt that no idea I had ever held was safe. For instance, we were not necessarily a happy family, with the most wonderful destinies waiting for my sister and me. We might make mistakes and choose wrong. Unhappiness was real. It was even likely. . . . How tired I became of studying my sister’s face. I got so I would do anything to keep from joining the two women on the porch.

  After three weeks of this, Sonny returned. I was never told whether he came of his own accord or whether he was summoned; but one night the yellow convertible drove up in front of our house and he was back. Now when my mother would watch my sister and Sonny getting into Sonny’s car in the evenings, she would turn away from the window smiling. “I think your sister has found a boy she can respect,” she would say, or

  “They’ll be very happy together,” or some such hopeful observation, which I could see no basis for, but which my mother believed with all the years and memories at her disposal, with all the weight of her past and her love for my sister. And I would go and call Preston.

  I used to lie under the dining-room table, sheltered and private like that, looking up at the way the pieces of mahogany were joined together, while we talked. I would cup the telephone to my ear with my shoulder and hold my textbook up in the air, over my head, as we went over physics, which was a hard subject for me. “Preston,” I asked one night,

  “what in God ’s name makes a siphon work?” They did work—everyone knew that—and I groaned as I asked it. Preston explained the theory to me, and I frowned, breathed heavily through my nose, squinted at the incomprehensible diagrams in the book, and thought of sex, of the dignity of man, of the wonders of the mind, as he talked. Every few minutes, he asked “Do you see” and I would sigh. It was spring, and there

  20

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  was meaning all around me, if only I were free—free of school, free of my mother, free of duties and inhibitions—if only I were mounted on a horse. . . . Where was the world? Not here, not near me, not under the dining-room table. . . . “Not quite,” I’d say, untruthfully, afraid that I might discourage him. “But I almost get it. Just tell me once more.” And on and on he went, while I frowned, breathed hard, and squinted. And then it happened! “I see!” I cried. “I see! I see!” It was air pressure! How in the world had I failed to visualize air pressure? I could see it now. I would never again not see it; it was there in my mind, solid and inde-structible, a whitish column sitting on the water. “God damn but science is wonderful!” I said, and heaved my physics book into the living room.

  “Really wonderful!”

  “It ’s natural law,” Preston said reprovingly. “Don’t get emotion mixed up with it.”

  One evening when my sister and Sonny didn’t have a date to go out, my mother tapped lightly on my foot, which protruded from under the dining-room table. “I have a feeling Sonny may call,” she whispered. I told Preston I had to hang up, and crawled out from beneath the table. “I have a feeling that they’re getting to the point,” my mother said. “Your sister’s nervous.”

  I put the phone back on the telephone table. “But, Mother—” I said, and the phone rang.

  “Sh-h-h,” she said.

  The phone rang three times. My sister, on the extension upstairs, said, “Hello. . . . Oh, Sonny. . . .”

  My mother looked at me and smiled. Then she pulled at my sleeve

  until I bent my head down, and she whispered in my ear, “They’ll be so happy. . . .” She went into the hall, to the foot of the stairs. “Tell him he can come over,” she whispered passionately.

  “Sure,” my sister was saying on the phone. “I’d like that. . . . If you want. . . . Sure. . . .”

  My mother went on listening, her head tilted to one side, the light falling on her aging face, and then she began to pantomime the answers my sister ought to be making—sweet yeses, dignified noes, and little bursts of alluring laughter.

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  21

  I plunged down the hall and out the screen door. The street lamps were on, and there was a moon. I could hear the children: “I see Digger.

  One-two-three, you’re caught, Digger. . . .” Two blocks away, the clock on the Presbyterian church was striking the hour. Just then a little girl left her hiding place in our hedge and ran shrieking for the tree trunk that was home-free base: “I’m home safe! I’m home safe! Everybody free!”

  All the prisoners, who had been sitting disconsolately on the bumpers of Mr. Karmgut ’s Oldsmobile, jumped up with joyful cries and scattered abruptly in the darkness.

  I lifted my face—that exasperating factor, my face—and stared

  entranced at the night, at the waving tops of the trees, and the branches blowing back and forth, and the round moon embedded in the night sky, turning the nearby streamers of cloud into mother-of-pearl. It was all very rare and eternal-seeming. What a dreadful unhappiness I felt.

  I walked along the curb, balancing with my arms outspread. Leaves hung over the sidewalk. The air was filled with their rustling, and they caught the light of the street lamps. I looked into the lighted houses.

  There was Mrs. Kearns, tucked girlishly into a corner of the living-room couch, reading a book. Next door, through the leaves of a tall plant, I saw the Lewises all standing in the middle of the floor. When I reached the corner, I put one arm around the post that held the street sign, and leaned there, above the sewer grating, where my friends and I had lost perhaps a hundred tennis balls, over the years. In numberless dusks, we had abandoned our games of catch and handball and gathered around the grating and stared into it at our ball, floating down in the darkness.

  The Cullens’ porch light was on, in the next block, and I saw Mr.

  and Mrs. Cullen getting into their car. Eleanor Cullen was in my class at school, and she had been dating Joel. Her parents were going out, and that meant she ’d be home alone—if she was home. She might have gone to the library, I thought as the car started up; or to a sorority meeting.

  While I stood there looking at the Cullens’ house, the porch light went off. A minute later, out of breath from running, I stood on the dark porch and rang the doorbell. There was no light on in the front hall, but the front door was open, and I could hear someone coming. It was Eleanor. “Who is it?” she asked.

  22

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa
r r o w i s d e a d

  “Me,” I said. “Are you busy? Would you like to come out for a little while and talk?”

  She drifted closer to the screen door and pressed her nose against it.

  She looked pale without makeup.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll have to go put my shoes on. I’m not in a good mood or anything.”

  “That ’s all right,” I said. “Neither am I. I just want to talk to somebody.”

  While I waited for Eleanor to come out, Mattie Seaton appeared,

  striding along the sidewalk. He was on the track team. “Hey, Mattie,” I called out to him.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “What ’s new?”

  “Nothing much,” he said. “You got your trig done?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “You going with her?” he asked, pointing to the house.

  “Naw,” I said.

  “Well, I got to get my homework done,” he said.

  “See you later,” I called after him. I knew where he was going: Nancy Ellis’s house, two blocks down.

  “Who was that?” Eleanor asked. She stepped out on the porch. She

  had combed her hair and put on lipstick.

  “Mattie Seaton,” I said.

  “He ’s pinned to Nancy,” Eleanor said. “He likes her a lot. . . .” She sat down in a white metal chair. I sat on the porch railing, facing her. She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You want a cigarette?” she asked.

  “No. I’m in training.”

  We looked at each other, and then she looked away, and I looked

  down at my shoes. I sat there liking her more and more.

  “How come you’re in a bad mood?” I asked her.

  “Me? Oh, I don’t know. How did you know I was in a bad mood?”

  “You told me.” I could barely make out her face and the dull color of her hands in the darkness.

  “You know, I think I’m not basically a happy person,” Eleanor said

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  23

  suddenly. “I always thought I was. . . . People expect you to be, especially if you’re a girl.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” I said.