by Alice Adams
Hours later, though, late that night, Lavinia’s bright mood has entirely dissolved; she can barely remember any earlier optimistic hours, ever.
For one thing, they are not dancing at LaRue, they are listening to jazz, at some place way down in the Village—all the fault of that stingy George Wharton, whom Lavinia has decided that she despises. The Village and this jazz place were George’s idea, and of course that dopey red-haired ugly Connie went along. “We can go to La Rue any time,” George Wharton said. “Jackson’s playing down at the Vanguard, let’s go hear him.” And tacky George also suggested a spaghetti dinner first, at some downtown place. (Well, maybe the Whartons are not really rich?)
And so, a dumb dinner over checked tablecloths, even sawdust on the floor—so utterly cornball. Candles dripping wax onto rivulets of more colored wax, down the sides of huge wine bottles, just like that tacky place in Cambridge that certain people (Megan) always thought was so terrific. The Oxford Grill.
And for some reason everyone was seated next to their husband—and so Henry Stuyvesant, with his silly date, some young deb, was not even at Lavinia’s table. There she was, next to Potter, with her terrible private thoughts.
And now this ghastly jazz place, where the Negro with the trombone is practically blasting them all out of their seats.
It is the sort of place that Megan probably comes to, Lavinia thinks, and she looks around apprehensively, as though Megan really might be there (Megan twice in one day would be much more than she could bear). She sees a lot of college kids, and some older couples, not very attractive. But fortunately not Megan.
However, having Megan so much on her mind gives Lavinia an idea. Leaning across the table to where George Wharton sits, with ugly Connie, quite audibly she shouts, above the pounding music, “Oh, George, I had lunch with a very dear old friend of yours today,” with one of her smiles.
“Oh?” Mean-faced Connie looks inquiringly at her husband.
“Megan Greene, of course. Such a career girl, and you wouldn’t believe how thin she’s got. You wouldn’t know her, but on the other hand I guess you would.”
“Megan?” Stupid George is actually blushing, as, ridiculously, Connie asks him, “Who is Megan Greene?”
“Now, George,” Lavinia begins to lecture, but at that moment the loud music gets even louder, a long crescendo, as though that awful black man were purposely drowning her out.
Did Megan and George Wharton ever actually, uh, do it? Lavinia considers that possibility through the next few long passages of music. George looked so miserably embarrassed at the mention of Megan’s name (so gratifying: that should teach him not to make everyone have cheap Italian food, and listen to this God-awful music). And, did Megan really do it with all those men, the way everyone said she did? Where there’s smoke there’s fire, but still, Lavinia isn’t as sure as she would like to be. At that moment an ugly, unbidden image has entered Lavinia’s mind, of Megan, naked, and as fat as she used to be, with a dark naked man on top of her, pumping into her, battering, with his huge, uh, thing. Lavinia closes her eyes against this hideous vision.
Then, to dispel what she sees, she opens her eyes as wide as she can, and finds herself staring into the eyes of that trombone player, Jackson something, who is smiling—Christ, smiling directly at her, and singing, to her, “You are my baby, you my sweetest darling little baby”—right at her.
Horrible! Intolerable! He should be arrested. In Washington, D.C., he probably would be, for looking at her like that.
Lavinia jerks her head around, and the nightmare in which she finds herself increases as she sees that Henry Stuyvesant is not even looking at her (not with the knowledge, the understanding that could save her life); he is looking at his date, some silly black-haired girl who looks (why didn’t Lavinia notice this before?) very Irish. Henry and that Irish girl are laughing, talking; with so much noise, that horrible trombone, it is impossible to make out what they are saying.
Saying nothing to anyone, and not even excusing herself (why bother? no one could hear her) Lavinia gets up and gropes her way through the noisy, crowded darkness, toward the ladies’ room, which turns out to be as dirty as she had feared.
She throws up into the toilet.
Not feeling better, Lavinia is washing her face when Connie Wharton comes into the room, of all people she did not want to see. Connie, with her mean little pale blue eyes, who will undoubtedly ask some dumb girlish question about Megan.
Connie does not; she barely smiles, and she rushes into the toilet stall, as Lavinia fleetingly observes that Connie looks even worse than she, Lavinia, did (but then of course she began looking worse). Obviously something was wrong with the food, at that crummy Italian place.
But it seems only polite to wait for Connie, who might need help.
Emerging, Connie again just barely smiles, as Lavinia says something about spaghetti, a poisoned sauce.
At which Connie turns on her and says, “It’s not the food. Don’t be so dumb, Lavinia. I’ve had much too much to drink. Surely that must be apparent, even to you? But I can only say that if you were married to George Wharton you’d drink a lot too.”
Lavinia murmurs something about being sorry—though precisely for what she would not have been able to say.
Seeming suddenly to feel a great deal better, Connie breaks into a smile, showing all her teeth and even further narrowing her little pig eyes (or so Lavinia perceives Connie’s face). “Don’t be sorry,” Connie tells her. “You may congratulate me. I’m going to be first in our group to get a divorce. How I wish George had married your friend, Megan what’s-her-name. Tell me, Lavinia, whatever was she like?”
“Well, actually she’s one of the prettiest and the most brilliant girls I ever knew.”
Connie sniffs. “In that case the more’s the pity,” she says.
16
A letter from Peg Harding Sinclair, in Midland, Texas, to Megan, in New York:
Dear Megan, You will be surprised to hear from me. Here it is almost Christmas, you will be surprised to hear how hot it is, down here. Yesterday 86, and this hot rain blew up from the Gulf. Dark sheets of hot rain, dark sheets of hot rain. You will think that a trite expression and typical, I am sure, of “Peg,” but that is what in fact the rain is like. It hits you in the face like wet clothes on a clothesline. All this part of the country, this part of Texas, is made of clay, and in the rain the clay gets very slick. It is impossible. I have four children.
I am not the person that I seem to you to be. Anyway, I have been wondering if maybe you are not either. Are not what you seem. Are any of us? (Trite question, I am sorry.) I am writing this letter, maybe. Are you as fat and oversexed as you look, or used to look? Are your “judgment” and your “taste” as poor as Lavinia always said they were? Is it true that you are more intelligent than any of us? Lavinia is much more intelligent than you think she is, even if she is not as she appears, i.e., is not the Duchess of Guermantes. I did not have a “lesbian” crush on Lavinia, just a maternal one. And now fate has punished me with four children. (That was a joke, ho ho.)
Just when I thought I had that problem, children, solved, another arrived. Just a month ago. She is one month old today. Kate. There is something wrong with her, though. All babies spit up but not like this. So much, such big white curds all over everything. Cameron can’t stand the smell. There are a lot of smells that Cameron can’t stand, in fact. Have you noticed this about other men? Do you know many men?
Do you think men have stronger noses than women do, or just weaker stomachs? When I can’t stand certain smells I do stand them anyway. It seems to me that I have no choice.
Would this be an interesting conversation, if we were friends?
In any case there is something wrong with Kate. In Dr. Spock I read about something called “projectile vomiting” which means that a baby has something called “pyloric stenosis.” Kate’s vomiting looks projectile to me. In a medical book I read about pyloric stenosis. It is a narrowi
ng of the tube below the stomach. Most characteristically it occurs in first-born sons who are born in the spring (never, interestingly, is there a recorded case of a female Negro, but maybe they just don’t record such cases, female Negroes?). Kate’s being a fourth-born girl, born in the late fall, maybe that is not what she has, or maybe it is. It sure looks like it. It is easily “correctable” by surgery, the medical book says. In the meantime I have to “let her cry” between meals. She can cry for a long time. Sometimes I go out into the yard so I won’t hear her, but I still can. Our yard is not very large, here in Midland.
This is really crazy. How can I imagine that you would be interested in pyloric stenosis, or in my children?
But I have not read any good books lately.
Books and sex. “Megan doesn’t care about anything but books and sex, fundamentally.” That is what Lavinia said, but is it true? I have no time to read. I suppose you would read a lot under any circumstances, four children or five or six (Jesus, six), but I do not. Cannot. At night I fall asleep. About sex I have nothing to say. Really nothing at all. One more thing I am not good at, would be one way to put it.
I am afraid.
I do everything wrong.
Cameron—
Peg does not mail this letter; she shoves it into a pigeonhole in her desk, as just at the instant of writing her husband’s name two things happen simultaneously: one, Kate begins to cry, and outside the sweeping rain begins again, dark sheets of it slapping the windows.
And so it is not clear to Peg what she had meant to say about Cameron, surely something, some explanation to Megan, about her life? Something that might catch Megan’s attention, interest her?
The twins are in nursery school, and this year Rex too, thank God, none of them home until three. But it is now only two thirty, and Kate is not supposed to be fed again until four; suppose she is still screaming when the other children get home? How to explain such screams? If Peg can’t bear to hear them, how about the children, who understand medical advice and “pyloric stenosis” even less than she herself does?
The screams are sharp, animal outcries.
Peg’s breasts ache, and her stomach knots.
And outside the rain is so thick and dark, so hot and terrible. Everywhere in the house she can hear the screams. The screams. The screams.
She is wearing a loose old cotton dress, one that fits in the early months of pregnancies and the first few months after a birth. Or, perhaps it never fits. Anyway, in that dress Peg hurries through her house, to the kitchen, to the back door, back porch. She rushes out into the warm, lashing black rain, in her barren backyard. So new, nothing growing, no time to plant. And the soil is terrible, now all wet and slick.
She stands there in the rain, raising her face up to it, her clothes all soaked through, instantly soaked, and she thinks: I am having some sort of a breakdown. I am not all right. I am too exhausted. As she thinks the word “exhausted” an image comes to her of old elastic, all dingy, worn out. No give. Exhausted.
This new subdivision where they live in Midland is raw and flat. And expensive. The houses are not close together, and now in the heavy rain Peg can see only rain, no other house, or bush or tree or road. But she can hear acutely, unmuffled by all that intervening, falling, falling water—she can hear the screams of her smallest, newest child.
In an instant, moving far more quickly than when she ran out into the rain, Peg rushes back into the house, all soaking dripping wet; she rushes into the baby’s yellow nursery. She opens her clothes to her breasts, and she snatches up the bright red, screaming baby, who for several minutes still breathes and gasps from all that screaming, who cannot at first seize the nipple.
Peg thinks two things: she thinks that she is wrong, she is doing just what the doctor said not to do, when Kate screams—and she thinks too that she is saving her child.
• • •
By the time the older children get home from school, Kate is mercifully asleep, and their mother is herself again, in old Levi’s from college and a big clean shirt, one of their father’s discards. She is big jolly Peg again, their mom.
She gets out crayons and fingerpaints for Candy and Carol, the twins, and books for Rex. She goes into the kitchen and begins to cut up a chicken for dinner; she and Cameron will have steaks later on, since he gets home late and does not like to have meals with children, not really. He likes to see them all clean and already fed and ready for bed, and not quite conscious.
Peg goes back and forth between the playroom and the kitchen; if she doesn’t watch the children the room will be hopeless. She makes their dinner, and then she gives them all baths, all the time praying that Kate does not wake up again. She cleans up their dinner. She puts in potatoes, makes the salad for her dinner with Cameron. Then she goes in to read to the children for a while.
Miraculously, tonight it all works out. By seven thirty, which is Cameron’s coming home time, Peg is on the sofa with Rex on her lap, one twin on either side of her. Reading Winnie-the-Pooh, which is Cameron’s favorite book. A perfect scene for him to walk into, or maybe she should have changed her dress? Peg (too late) wonders. Put on lipstick? However, why? Cameron after all married “good old Peg.”
He comes in hurriedly, his hair distraught. He looks tired, with his worried eyes. He smiles at them all. “Well, old girl. And young ladies. Rex, how’s my boy?”
The next day, for no reason that she can understand, Peg again tries to write a letter to Megan.
Dear Megan, I am sure that I was writing a letter to you but it seems to be misplaced. Lost, strayed, but who would steal such a thing? However I do remember that the last word was “Cameron,” and I know what I meant to say. To ask. There is something, actually several things, that I do not understand. About Cameron. Men. Could you help? Do you know a lot of men? Understand them?
Cameron and I have a serious problem of no words. We have no words for anything that we do, much less for any of the parts of our bodies. I think of what we do as “doing it,” and of his instrument as his “thing.” We do it a lot. Cameron is very fond of numbers and I think he counts. I would not be surprised to find a calender of his on which he had noted dates and numbers, records.
But in some way Cameron is worried about his thing. I am not allowed to touch it. In and out of me like Dresden china in and out of some bag (joke, ho ho, Peg the bag). But is that usual, with men?
I read in a sex book about mutual touching, but we do not mutually touch. Does he take it out of me so slowly so as not to break it off? And then he goes into the bathroom, for a ritual wash. Well, I guess you would just say that is how Cameron is. Wouldn’t you? I think I should not read sex books.
Another thing you do not know about me is how rich I am. Lavinia recognized it right off, she can smell a lot of money. I suppose any Guermantes could. But smart as you are I do not think you are very smart about money, fat Megan. I am probably about twenty times as rich as Lavinia is. Cameron knew that too. He knew my parents in Plainfield, of course, but he also has Lavinia’s nose for money.
But Cameron wants us to be even richer than we are. That is why we are “living simply.” We have no maid. No maid is better for the children, I am sure, or almost sure. The maids around our house in Plainfield were mean.
I just wish I were not so tired. We are putting all our money into oil, fields and wells. All my trust income and all Cameron’s salary. All oil. I hope he isn’t wrong about oil but he probably is not.
With love from your fat friend (ha ha).
17
Cathy hates California, or rather, she hates the portion of it that she finds at Stanford, around Palo Alto. She hates it more than she could admit to anyone, even to Megan. And she now recognizes that in some curious way she had anticipated that her sojourn in California would be somehow parallel or akin to Megan’s in New England. She had imagined that she would experience the exhilaration that Megan often spoke of, as Megan described her own migration from one coast to another. To
o late, Cathy perceives that this was a literary possibility, not to be actualized. For why indeed should California prove exhilarating to a prospective economist, an Irish Catholic from Philadelphia, who is secretly literary?
It does not; California fails to exhilarate. What Cathy feels is acute isolation, and deprivation. Depression. And she blames herself, of course: who else? Undoubtedly the capacity for enlightenment and for pleasure lay within Megan herself, the evident virtues and beauties and excitements of New England notwithstanding. Megan is an essentially joyous, receptive person, one happily open to new experience (slightly indiscriminate, one could possibly say, of Megan; Lavinia said it quite often, but was that really, in any final way, accurate?). Whereas she, Cathy, is just the opposite. She is withdrawn, and enclosed. She is generally hostile to new impressions, new ideas, and heaven knows hostile to new people, generally.
Everyone at Stanford appears to be so large, even oversized, and everyone is blond; Cathy has never felt so thin and dark. The boys all wear tight Levi’s and clean tight white T-shirts; the girls wear pastel cashmere sweaters and matching flannel skirts. The girls’ white socks are neatly folded down, as opposed to the gym socks they all used to wear at Radcliffe, turned up to their calves. These girls wear mocassins or saddle shoes (saddle shoes!), and strands of pearls, always pearls, a whole industry of pearls, offsetting those fresh California skins and pearly upper-middle-class teeth.
There are no Negroes. A few people might be Jewish but they just as well might not be. The same with Irish Catholics, except for a priest in Cathy’s Milton class (she allows herself a few literary indulgences, from her strict economics diet); that priest, with his white hair and red face, is the most familiar-looking person around.