by Jane Rule
“Having a hot flash?” her even more aging secretary had asked in a kindly tone. “I’ll open a window.”
It was bitterly funny and a relief to know that such sweating, shaking appetite could be ordinarily diagnosed. Glands. And suddenly every memory of a well-padded or bone-brittle woman—a teacher she had had in college, Maud Montgomery at her mother’s bridge table, her cleaning woman, even the haughty Beatrice at the dinner table, quickly reaching for a handkerchief, more urgent and embarrassed than in any need to sneeze—became transformed for Rosemary into horrified hilarity. Menopause as pure lechery. No wonder then the sudden hysterics, the glooming depressions, the paranoid jealousies if the terrible truth was that each of these ludicrous bodies was suffering its first, and only, experience of pure appetite, obsessed by who knew what object: everything from the proverbial milkman (egg lady?) to the unprepared and certainly unwilling husband (best friend at the church bazaar? sister?). A kept secret only because for most it was too preposterous to accept and act upon? For most the body was already chained and shamed by childbearing or operations, by years of intimately indifferent companions or singleness, by a morality that could hide all vanity? Or did Maud Montgomery suddenly present herself to her slowly deteriorating husband, Beatrice to her lumbering, beloved sister, her mother to… heaven knew whom?
“I am out of my mind,” Rosemary said, the sweat beginning, and she violently turned off F Street just two blocks before she would have to pass George’s.
She therefore did not see the sign that occasionally hung at the door, saying OUT TO LUNCH. And she would not have recognized Grace Hill’s car parked indiscreetly in front of Ries’s drugstore.
Instead she was saying to herself, “I’ve got to keep myself busy, very busy.” For she only wished that she could not imagine herself, having said what she had said, phoning Dina, going to Dina, pounding down the door to say, “I don’t love you. I don’t even know you. I don’t care how little interest you have in me. I don’t care how aloof you stay from me. Just take me.” Rosemary Hopwood, who had always been pursued, who had always been circumspect, “socially and emotionally impeccable!” a lover had once shouted against her pride and self-control, had to stop imagining herself capable of what she had already done.
She was very grateful to know that she would be having dinner with Ida that evening, for, if anyone could have a calming effect on her, it was Ida, who had served Rosemary as a model of self-sufficiency all her life.
The drive out to Ida’s was always peaceful, and now in late May it was light enough to see the deepening green fields through fences tangled with wild climbing roses. But the graves were not, this evening, like grazing sheep, not the Setworths’ easy companions, not the finally silenced rancor of dead parents, not even the mortality Rosemary might be said to be struggling against or toward. Dull punctuation, that was all, but that would have to be distraction enough for now. At the top of the hill would be the positive relief of Ida, who had never at any age or any season been troubled by the bitter comedies of flesh that visited everyone else.
If Rosemary had not been a more than normally tactful person, she would have commented on Ida’s appearance at once. She looked, in ways hard to account for together, dreadful. Her eyes had faded to nearly no color, as if the blue had drained into her cheeks, and she was wearing a gash of lipstick which, instead of brightening her face, made it the more cadaverous. Ida usually wore the kinds of clothes no one noticed beyond the impression of neat, soft freshness, like her voice in ordinary conversation. This evening she had on a strong, busy print, splotched with red.
“Is that a new dress?” Rosemary asked, intending kindness.
“I suppose it is,” Ida said, looking down at it as if to make sure.
There was no slur in her speech, and she moved about the room with characteristic frail efficiency, but Rosemary couldn’t dismiss the fear that Ida had had a small stroke.
“Do you think I’m getting too old to live out here by myself?” Ida suddenly asked.
“Do you think so?”
“No,” Ida said.
“Then who does? Haven’t you been feeling well?”
“Well enough for seventy-eight,” Ida said.
“I suppose it must feel isolated sometimes,” Rosemary offered carefully.
“I’m used to that. More often than not I like it.”
“Yes, I’ve always thought you did.”
“But you think it would be sensible if I moved into town, at my age,” Ida said, in a tone that implied it was Rosemary’s suggestion in the first place.
“If you want to,” Rosemary said. “If you’d be more comfortable.”
I can’t imagine that I would be. I’ve lived in this house for seventy-one years.”
“Then why are you thinking about it, Ida? What’s worrying you?”
“Am I worried?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Rosemary said.
“I miss Beatrice,” Ida said.
“Yes, I’m sure you do. In ways it must be as hard for you as it is for Amelia,” Rosemary said. “Were you thinking that, perhaps, you might go to Amelia?”
“To Amelia? Heavens no. I can’t talk to Amelia. I don’t even want to. Do you mean to live?”
“I just wondered…”
“With Amelia and Cole and a light-struck girl? What an idea, Rosemary!”
“I didn’t mean to say I thought it was a good one.”
“I must put on the vegetables,” Ida said.
Rosemary picked up the volume of Yeats that was always by Ida’s chair and opened it to:
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
turned pages quickly and saw:
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But token I think of that my tongue’s a stone.
glanced down the page to:
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
and stopped.
“I don’t know how you go on reading him, year after year,” she said to Ida as she came back into the room.
“He’s an honest companion,” Ida said.
“Give me a happy liar then.”
“The remarkable thing about poetry is that you always think you understand it until you understand it differently and realize you didn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Rosemary asked.
“I suppose simply that a good poem tells you what you need to know at the time, or what you can take. Aunt Setworth used to say no one under seventy could have any idea what Yeats meant, but I thought I did.”
“And didn’t you?”
“No better than you do,” Ida said. “If you want another drink, you had better fix it for yourself. Dinner’s nearly ready.”
“I think I won’t, thanks.”
“You look tired,” Ida said.
“I suppose I am. I probably ought to think about taking a vacation.”
“Did you have dinner with Dina Pyros last Saturday?”
“Yes, I did,” Rosemary answered, trying to sound unguarded.
“That must have pleased her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She seems to me an intelligent young woman. She must get bored with the number of young delinquents who take up her time… and the neurotics like Grace Hill.”
“Do you know Grace Hill?”
“Only enough to know she makes a nuisance of herself. Feller Hill would have gone a long way in politics by now if he hadn’t been tied to her.”
“Where did he find her anyway?”
“In the wicked city,” Ida said. “Some people haven’t the sense not to bring them home.”
“That sounds more like Beatrice than it does like you.”
“It is Beatrice
,” Ida said. “What is most tiresome about the dead is having to keep up both sides of the conversation. Is that what’s the matter with me, I wonder.”
“What is the matter, Ida?”
“I’m too old to be struck by lightning,” Ida said. “Come. Let’s have our supper.”
They ate and then tidied the kitchen together in quiet amiability of the sort they had shared for a number of years rather like mother and daughter but much more like friends. Settled again in the living room, Ida was looking better, and Rosemary had relaxed.
“If you don’t want to go on living alone,” Rosemary said. “Why don’t you come and live with me?”
“You sensibly escaped your own mother’s old age. There’s no reason for you to deal with mine.”
“I didn’t love my mother,” Rosemary said. “You know, it might be a very happy arrangement for both of us.”
“Why is it suddenly that everyone wants me to move into town?” Ida demanded.
“Everyone?”
“Rosemary, how old are you?”
“Forty-six.”
“Do you think you’re too old to marry?”
“Of course,” Rosemary said, “and not in the least interested in the idea, I never have been.”
“Neither have I,” Ida said. “But at the age of seventy-eight, I’m considering it. Please laugh.”
Rosemary did not. She sat, widely dark-eyed, and waited.
“I may marry Carl Hollinger.”
“Carl Hollinger?”
“He’s lonely. He’s a good man. He suggested the idea as sensible. I don’t think it is. In fact, I can’t imagine it, but I find, as the days pass, that I’m trying to.”
“Do you want to, Ida? Do you love him?”
“I’m upset by the absurdity of it.”
“What’s absurd about it?” Rosemary asked.
“Beatrice could have told you.”
“Beatrice is dead,” Rosemary said. “And I never really did like her sense of humor.”
“I depended on it,” Ida said. “If you’ve had to be, all your life, a quaint little bag of bones in a graveyard, the best sort of friend is one who thinks it’s funny.”
“Oh, Ida…”
“She also knew her kind of beauty—and yours—were bad jokes.”
“Beatrice Larson was a bitter old woman,” Rosemary said.
“Yes,” Ida agreed. “But she knew how to laugh,”
“Marry him,” Rosemary said.
“I don’t know,” Ida said. “I don’t know.”
V
AMELIA WAS AT HER desk late Friday afternoon, waiting for Rosemary and Agate to arrive. Below her in the side garden Cole, in a pair of modest trunks, lay stricken in the sun for vanity rather than pleasure. If she had thought he would stay there long, she might have suggested that he move, though she doubted that the pale-bodied boy would excite any interest in the drug-peddling, angry young mother-to-be she was about to interview. Amelia was not apprehensive. She was distracted and heavy with the diaries she had been reading. Her first method, reading through sixty-three Mays, had been arbitrary and frivolous, giving her little of Sister but her hatred of roses and chronic spring envies. So Amelia had started again at the beginning. Those first years, like the first years of any life, passed quickly, but now she was in distended adolescence, and she began to realize what a long life Sister had had of roses and relatives. It depressed her, but she felt, by now, committed to the task, as she had been committed to living with Beatrice through all those years the first time. Why? She couldn’t explain it to herself except as moral perversity: love.
“Miss A?” she heard Kathy call, though she hadn’t heard the bell. “Miss A?”
“Are they here?” Amelia answered.
“Miss A?” The calling was urgent.
Amelia hoisted herself up from her desk and turned on her good leg. “What is it, Kathy?”
“Miss A?”
Amelia could not hurry. She had to move at the same pace to dinner or disaster. As she crossed the hall, she knew Kathy had stopped calling because she could hear Amelia coming toward the kitchen. There Kathy stood, leaning on the kitchen table, water streaming down her legs.
“It’s all right, child,” Amelia said. “The sac’s broken, that’s all.”
“What will I do?”
“Sit down.”
“I can’t. I…”
“Yes you can,”
“I have to clean it up. I have to clean myself up.”
“You have to sit down,” Amelia said, reaching her and steering her to a wooden chair. “There’s nothing wrong, except it’s time.”
“It’s not supposed to do that,” Kathy said.
“It’s just one of the ways, one of nature’s ways,” Amelia said. “Now you stay there, and I’ll call Cole.”
“No, no, don’t call Cole!”
“He’ll get the car,” Amelia said. “By that time you’ll be fine. We’ll just get some towels. You’ll be fine.”
“It’s not supposed to do that,” Kathy repeated, tears of fear and embarrassment beginning to brighten her eyes.
“Yes it is,” Amelia said. “The sac has to break some time. This is one of the times. Now just sit there.”
Amelia crossed the hall again and went to the study window. “Cole? Pull on some trousers and a shirt and get the car. It’s time to take Kathy to the hospital.”
The abruptness of his response belied the relaxation of his pose. He was out of the lawn chair like something released and nearly collided with Amelia as she crossed the hall again.
“What shall I do?” he asked.
“Just what I said,” Amelia said. “Quietly and calmly.”
“Is she all right?”
“Yes, she’s all right. The sac’s broken, and that’s a little uncomfortable. That’s all. When you’ve got some clothes on, get a bath-mat and some towels and put them on the back seat of the car before you bring it round.”
Back in the kitchen, Amelia found Kathy trying to clean up the floor.
“Kathy, I told you to sit down. Now don’t be silly.”
Amelia went to the phone and called the hospital. Then she tried to reach Rosemary at the unwed mothers’ home, but she and Agate had already left; so Amelia took a piece of kitchen note-paper and wrote a message to be left on the front door. Kathy sat, a fist in her mouth to keep herself quiet.
“Can I put on another skirt?”
“Of course.”
Cole brought the car right to the bottom of the front steps and opened both the back and front doors. Then he stopped to tie his tennis shoes, his hands shaking, the tic in his cheek leaping. He was surprised to see Kathy coming through the front door the shape he’d grown accustomed to. He had half imagined that there in the kitchen she was slowly going down like a balloon while he tore on clothes and floundered downstairs in danger of his flying laces. He could see that she had been crying, and he suddenly felt sorry for her in a way that hadn’t occurred to him before in her gentle, slow-moving dullness. She must be frightened much more importantly than he was, who was only concerned about his own clumsiness. Without deciding to, he went up the stairs, put an arm around her waist, the other under her arm, helped her down the stairs and into the back seat, strewn with ill-matching towels. Amelia was tacking a note to Rosemary on the door. Cole returned for her, waiting two steps down for her hand on his shoulder. As soon as he felt that weight, he took a slow step down, then another, teetering a little as he always did when he couldn’t move at the pace his own balance dictated, but behind him Amelia was as steady as she was unbalancing. Once at the car, she helped herself in.
“All right now?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Yes, it’s stopped, I think,” Kathy said.
“Now, once you’re there and they admit you, I’ll go on up to the waiting room, and, as soon as you’re settled, I’ll be right there.”
“Oh, Miss A, you don’t have to …”
“I’ll be right there.
”
“But you’re expecting Miss Hopwood and the new girl. You’re…”
“I’ve left them a note. They can come any day.”
“But who’s going to cook supper?”
“There probably won’t be anyone home to eat it,” Amelia said.
“I can cook,” Cole offered. “I make great scrambled eggs.”
He was a careful, sometimes even slightly nervous driver for all that he loved the stock car races, and now that his intense moment of pity for Kathy had passed, he was aware of the pulsing nausea in his guts. He braked too hard at the edge of the street, and then the car stuttered slightly into the turn.
“We’re not in any desperate hurry, Cole,” Amelia said, to reassure him. “There’s plenty of time.”
“Is the baby all right in there without the water?” Kathy asked.
“Oh yes,” Amelia said. “Just beginning to learn to live on dry land.”
Dry land: but Cole saw it like something trapped in a collapsed balloon, a fish flipping, snapping itself in two, dashing itself against the rocky bone of pelvis. His own stomach lurched, and he remembered reading in anthropology about a tribe in which the men lay in bed, writhing in sympathetic labor, while the women delivered their babies squatting in the fields. And he felt stupidly frightened, ignorant of all the simple facts of life. Was Cousin A telling the truth? Was it all right? Or was it like a fish, dying in there, as he drove, on the fleshy shores of her womb? The images had the quality of hallucination: he was running down the pink and blood-pooled shore toward a baby, flipping and twisting itself, and he must get to it quickly, pick it up, and hurl it back into the sea. Or he was pulling to get the creature out, out of the cavern of her flesh, and how could it come, wedged there, without the tearing of limbs, the crushing of head?
“Take F Street,” Amelia suggested unnecessarily.
“It feels sort of funny, Miss A.”
“I know. It will now, but it’s all right. Look, there’s Dina, putting Harriet’s chest on the trunk. Give her a honk, Cole.”
Dina looked up, saw the Larson car, saw Kathy in the back, and waved. She stood on the deck of the truck and watched the car out of sight, her hand moving from her hip to her belly, where she could feel the gathering of her own wasted blood. Then she turned back to the rope in her hand and tied the chest down. Harriet Jameson had said she could be home at five thirty to receive it. When Dina looked up again, Rosemary Hopwood was driving by with a remarkably good-looking girl sitting beside her. Neither of them looked up, but Rosemary must have seen Dina, who wanted to call out some greeting or at least make some gesture, though she was in the habit of making no first move. It had been a very long week since she had poured those glasses of ouzo, Grace Hill only making it longer. Answering a need in women had for years seemed to Dina simply a way of answering a minor need of her own, a quieting of the guilt she felt about a mother and sisters who worked the fields their men had died in through serial wars with the Andartes. She did not remember any of them, nor had she ever learned the language they spoke. It would have done no good to write to them anyway, since they could not read. She gave money to Nick, who mailed a check every month to the Greek head of the family, their shared grandmother.