The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  You’re quiet this evening.

  Am I?

  Penny, he said. She held out her hand. He rolled his eyes, smiling, and dug in his pockets.

  I’ve got a penny, Michael Peretti said.

  She reached across the table and let him press it into her palm. Now I’ve got to deliver, she said. She felt less afraid of him now, even though he still held her hand a fraction too long, even under her husband’s eyes.

  I want my money’s worth.

  You’ll get it, she said. I was thinking about the war.

  Is she telling the truth, Pass?

  How should I know? her husband said. Grinning, though. Earlier Peretti had enquired after her mother-in-law and expressed his concern like a gentleman. He had rested a hand on her husband’s shoulder and asked for the name of her pavilion so he could send flowers. Did she have a favourite flower? Roses, her husband said apologetically, but he had taken it in stride. Now they were kidding a little in their old way – a first small sweet candy, bittersweet, after their long abstinence.

  What about the war, then? he asked. What does she think of the war?

  That it will be over soon.

  She reads the newspapers.

  Smiling: Sometimes she does.

  And will we be better or worse off when it’s over?

  What a question, she said, and started to clear the table.

  What were you really thinking about at supper this evening? her husband asked her later, after Peretti had gone. You were miles away.

  Have you taken your pill?

  Sitting in bed, he held up his water glass to toast her. She saw him in the mirror of her vanity, where she sat with her back to him, brushing her hair. When he set it down she saw the dim places where his fingerprints had clouded the glass.

  Maybe you should sell the house, she said slowly. I’ve been thinking.

  That’s more like it. He looked up from his magazine, interested now.

  I keep thinking about your mother, she said, wrinkling her brow. And those boys playing croquet. And how when I asked her to come to the house with me she always said she couldn’t face it yet. I’ve been thinking she might be afraid of having to go back there and selling it might actually be a weight off her mind.

  See, he said eagerly, slapping his magazine on his leg. That’s just what –

  Wait, though. My mind’s been going round and round. I keep trying to juggle the best thing for you and the best thing for her –

  – understand me. I –

  Yes, she said. We’ll have to show the house. I’ll get it ready, like you asked me to.

  Come here, he said.

  Have you taken your pill?

  There had been no pleasure in it, his eagerness, his breathing. She lay curled in the heavy warmth of her husband’s pinning limbs, soft meat in his shell, and let images from the afternoon reappear. Fumes, nothing. Despite his cocky entrance he had clearly not done anything of the kind before and between them they had not even managed to warm the sheets. She had lain in gooseflesh while he strained, with his skinny sharp knees and skinny sharp elbows, his bitter little hip bones pestling her own. The joke was how quickly he coated the reality of it, came to believe he’d acquitted himself like a champion. Or perhaps the joke was on her, the joke being that the prism of his senses so refracted her own experience that he really had been as happy, as shot with rainbows, all that hour, as he swore. Her husband shifted beside her in sleep, managing to turn away and bring her with him, so that their positions reversed and she pressed against his back, their four ankles still tangled. If it were only this half of him, the night half, the hot sweat of the marriage bed, if only she could cut away what she wanted as though cutting away the bad half of an orange. She would leave a trail of halved people if she could, even (sleepy now, fonder now) keep a small wedge of the boy to squeeze into her blander days. The intensity that propelled him past caution, the way curiosity did her: that tart concentrate. That she would keep.

  Suddenly her days were full, dangerously full, glass after dark, brimming glass she must carry across whitest carpet. The real estate agent, a major’s wife keeping the business warm, came every day with the spare keys to prepare a lunch in her mother-in-law’s kitchen and drink tea from her mother-in-law’s cups and show prospective buyers what she referred to as the house’s points. (Some of her mother-in-law’s wealthy crosstown friends had decked themselves out in hats and gloves, as prospective buyers, to keep an eye on the woman for poor Cora’s sake, they told Anna when they proposed the cabal, something they would never have suggested had the agent been the major. Though they enjoyed their tea the same either way by the number of cups, stained and grimy with sugar, left in the sink every evening.) And every evening, now, after this approximation of a working woman left, Anna arrived to clean – shoe prints on the floors, furniture out of place, smudges on walls and glass and brass, some fingerprints to wipe away, many more to leave. Her days were full, the house was full of prospective buyers known by their soiling, of her parents’-in-law’s appalled ghosts. (She pictured them precisely where they had left themselves, in extremis: her father-in-law at the kitchen table breathless over a newspaper, her mother-in-law smiling at a spoon.)

  There was the boy. When she explained he mustn’t leave marks on her, she saw his eyes deepen at the thought, one which had not previously occurred to him. She saw she was damaging him but it was not to be helped.

  Evidence: he grew braver. On the first of May he produced the little leaf of paper she had given him the first time they met in the café. He carried it everywhere, evidently, tucked inside his cigarette box. They had had a little connubial conversation about it, nude and cooling, had talked a little philosophy, aired a little cynicism there on the sheets. He had liked that. She began to get a sense of his life – the giddy younger sister, the family dog, the meaty meals, and his contentment with it all until he started reading certain books. He had been a happy child (she placed it, finally, that telltale lingering coarseness, that inclination to laugh), but now he claimed to recognize a fecklessness in his mother’s sandwich doilies, a living death in his father’s ruminant tranquility before the radio every evening. (The sister he loved and swallowed whole and would have died for, though he didn’t know it and was as abominable to her as he knew how.) He read, he brooded, he suspected himself of a superior intellect. His grades slipped even lower. His friends smoked but they did not read Sartre. He had no one to talk to about Sartre and Marx and Turgenev, his salt licks, and then there was the business of girls and women, the torment of girls and women. After he left her in the evenings, he returned to the store to help his father slaughter chickens, and then he had homework, algebra, and then to bed where – he claimed with a morose relish – he couldn’t sleep for thinking of her and their “impossible situation.”

  Her husband, too, worked into every evening now, a foot in each job while the management decided where they liked him better, setting type or taking pictures. At night they lay together, jointly and severally exhausted, minds swirling with plans and cold dregs of plans.

  Buddy, that’s wonderful.

  Starting Monday. (He socked his fist repeatedly into his palm, like a boy waiting on a baseball.) I’ll be working directly under Peretti now. And another five dollars a week, how about that?

  You deserve it.

  At first I didn’t know what was going on. Tanner called me into his office and there’s Peretti at his elbow and both of them looking grim as thunder. For a minute I thought it was that Bonner business again, you remember?

  He blushed a little just saying it, she noticed.

  The next thing I know there’s a glass in my hand and they’re toasting my future. I couldn’t believe it.

  It’s wonderful news. Do you think –

  Mm?

  Wait. Do you think I could have my allowance back, in that case? We can afford it now, can’t we?

  He let go.

  I see, she said.

  I told you how
it was. It’s not a matter of what we can afford or not afford. You have to show a little responsibility first. You must learn. I told you.

  All right, you told me, she said.

  The next evening they were invited to a party at the Tanners’ in honour of her husband’s promotion. They had quarrelled again in the car on the way over and when they got there he abandoned her at the door, riding into the big house on a swell of cheers when the other guests realized who it was. She hung back, allowing Mrs. Tanner to take her coat and congratulate her on her husband’s good fortune.

  Oh, we’re thrilled, Anna said.

  So you should be, dear, Mrs. Tanner said.

  Knowing no one, she smiled and smiled and looked for small places where she could stand aside and watch the room. Someone brought her a drink, wet all over the outside of the glass, and talked to her. He must have got bored because she took a sip of her drink and when she looked again he was gone. So strong was her desire to be anywhere else that the room lost reality, thinned somehow, until normal behaviour seemed strange as anthropology. She knew it was necessary for these guests, these colleagues, to talk to one another; she knew it was necessary for their wives to smile and laugh and speak and be pleasant and set one another at ease. They greeted her but instinct moved them quickly away, as though from a vacuum they risked being sucked into. Far away, through layers and layers of glass, these good people lived their lives, but she was another species entirely, with her quick black smarts, her smiles reeking of theatre, and they knew it, and she knew it. Nothing came naturally. A merciful God would not let me know these things about myself, she thought. He wouldn’t render His creation so clumsily and then give her a hawk’s eye.

  I hadn’t taken you for a wallflower.

  Am I?

  Aren’t you?

  What did you take me for, then?

  A collage of images assembled and disassembled in her mind in the moments of realizing who had taken her elbow and greeted her so familiarly: rinsing relief, first, at the familiar voice, and second the flaring realization that he was the one she should have chosen. He would have been willing, would have known what to do. In this reaction she saw the dimensions of her own loneliness, even as she found herself wondering if she had ever truly disliked him.

  They’re not used to a young man, Peretti was saying, nodding across the room to where her tall tow-headed husband stood in a clutch of women old enough to see a son in him.

  He was desperate when the army wouldn’t take him. People used to say things to him on the street, just walk up to him and call him a coward. To look at him you wouldn’t know there was a thing wrong with him.

  He almost didn’t get this promotion because of that, Peretti said. Tanner wasn’t sure he’d be able to take the strain.

  He can take it.

  Can you?

  You ask very personal questions, Mr. Peretti.

  Michael.

  Michael.

  I take a personal interest, he said. Is she enjoying herself?

  Why, sure I am.

  Is she happy?

  Of course.

  No, she isn’t.

  You do ask the most extraordinary questions.

  I get excited when you lie, Michael Peretti said. Why is that?

  Will you excuse me, she said, but he would not leave go her hand.

  I know a friend of yours, by the way.

  She was watching the Tanners.

  Bumped into him, I should say. Boy on a bicycle, staring at your house. The last time I came for dinner.

  Friend of mine? she said. I don’t know any boys.

  She was watching the Tanners bully a young reporter into another drink. Cat and dog, those Tanners, hot bark to icy purr, and every night they lay down together as though the rice was still in their hair. You could tell. They’d be bringing out cigars next. Peretti’s thumb in her palm. Her mind everywhere.

  You do, Michael Peretti said. Because I saw him at your mother-in-law’s house also, one evening last week, going round back like he knew his business.

  What were you doing there?

  Expecting to find you alone.

  Across the room her husband saw them standing together and held a hand up to Peretti, who did the same, like men saluting each other across railroad tracks. There’s no sin in dreaming, is there? he murmured. I have an idea what her little life is like.

  Do you?

  A boy? he said. A child? Shame, Mrs. Pass.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  She watched his broad back as he walked away from her, toward her husband, and shivered. Oh yes, he was definitely the one she should have used. She watched them meet in the centre of the room, shake hands, and trade places: the American to stand amongst the newspapermen, her husband to come to her side. He was laughing still at something the other had said. When he reached her he said, Your face. What was Michael telling you?

  Oh, she said. I’m in a black mood tonight. He was just trying to cheer me up.

  Anna?

  Sleep left her slowly, teasingly stripping its veils away. She had been dreaming that someone was crying, a great rhythmic wailing that made sense of something she had been struggling to understand. The last puzzle piece fell into place as she realized the sound was coming from her own mouth.

  Baby, wake up.

  She whimpered a little at being woken. The wail persisted. So it was not coming from her after all.

  Something’s happening, her husband said, his own face still creased with sleep as he winced at the morning light.

  Air-raid sirens, that was the sound. She looked at the clock: four minutes after seven.

  It’s the war, she said, realizing. It’s over.

  They went downtown, like everyone else, it turned out. They took the streetcar, where the driver waved them on for free. The men were laughing and shaking hands all up and down the car, full of pep, and the girls were all dressed to the nines. Anna found herself next to a little waitress who was skipping her shift to go downtown and see the fun.

  Well, I’d like to see him fire me over this, she kept saying, and Anna kept nodding as though she was intimate with the details. He can threaten every little bit he wants. I’ve got brothers just the same as anyone.

  They’ll be coming home soon? Anna said politely.

  The waitress turned to the woman on her other side and said, I’d just like to see him fire me. I’d just like to see him try.

  The streetcar made halting progress as cars surged by, honking and trailing strings of tin cans, with passengers leaning out the windows, cheering and waving. People without cars ran alongside the traffic, shaking cowbells, blowing whistles, beating pot lids, any noisemakers they could find. They weaved in and out of traffic, strangers beating out tattoos on the sides of the tram and kissing each other. A tribe of young boys who had clearly skipped school were behaving like Red Indians, with makeshift headdresses and feathers, whooping and stomping in a victory dance. Above it all the air-raid sirens persisted, keening peace.

  At Hastings and Granville the streetcar stopped and the driver put everyone off. It was as though they had jumped into an ocean of sound: the car horns, the bells and whistles, a ragged refrain of “Roll Out the Barrel,” and from the harbour the obstinate lowing of ships’ horns. Faces flared and faded back into the crowd: men of business and their secretaries, newsboys determinedly hawking papers left over from the weekend. Looking up, Anna saw men and women leaning out of office windows and emptying their wastepaper baskets onto the revellers below. Then the air was full of paper, white scraps she picked from her hair – bank statements, tickertape, adding-machine paper, bills. More young boys were festooning the lamp standards with toilet tissue, and then the church bells began to ring. They forged upstream to Hastings and Howe, where office workers had formed a conga line and were dancing through the crowd, picking up length by the moment. Anna lost go of her husband’s hand then and felt herself swept towards the whip-end of the dancers. A man behind her
seized her hips and tried to manoeuvre her into the line. He nuzzled into her hair and licked at her ear, pressing her into the dancer in front of her, whose shoulders she had automatically taken to steady herself. Then Buddy was back, laughing and pulling her away.

  All right? he said. She could not hear his voice but made out the words from the shape of his lips.

  Fine, she said, and could not hear her own voice either.

  He pushed her ahead of him after that, keeping a hand on her neck like a collar, so he wouldn’t lose her again. She felt the skin of her throat go taut and slack, taut and slack, as he kneaded the back of her neck in his excitement.

  As the morning wore on, the festivities became both more organized and more general. They wandered all over downtown, letting themselves be pushed by the crowd. Cars were draped with flags, now, Red Ensigns and Union Jacks, and the cathedrals had thrown open their doors for impromptu thanksgiving services. Crepe paper streamers replaced toilet paper in Maypole whirls around the lamps and in the trees, and one department store had hung enormous coloured likenesses of Mr. Churchill, Mr. Stalin, and President Roosevelt from their fourth-floor windows. But stores were largely closed, some with their windows nervously boarded over, and by noon many cafés were closed too, having run out of food.

  My camera, Buddy said, stricken.

  They were standing a ways up Granville Street, by the Birks clock, not far from where a woman had just fainted away from all the excitement. A photographer had appeared even before some men with a stretcher, a man who exchanged nods with her husband before going about his work, asking people to step back and give him a little room around the unconscious woman with the blouse skewed off over one shoulder.

  That’s Smith, her husband said, fretting now. You met him at the Tanners’, don’t you remember? By God, I should be working too.

  She thought for a moment, then took a single halting step and stumbled against him as though her legs had gone weak. She held a hand to her forehead and said wonderingly, Buddy?