by Joan Silber
He was much more patient with them than she was—listening to Suzanne’s disjunct recitations, letting Claire kick at his knees in her stiff white kid shoes. He was hungry for them, he felt deprived if he arrived home from work after their bedtime, he liked the feel of them; there was something almost painful in the way he picked them up and smiled at them that slow smile broken by the lines around his eyes. She was touched by him at these moments, so that, watching him, she rested in the shade of his fatherliness, as though it were extended to her.
They were both very tired at this particular period in their lives, she from the children, he from the long hours at the drugstore. It sometimes made them companionably weary with each other. They sat reading in the living room in the evenings, and Leonard brought out plates of late-night snacks—odd, male combinations, tinned meats and sardines and toast—which she ate with a great show of praise.
Once, in bed at night, when he was dreaming fitfully—breathing unevenly and whimpering in his sleep—she put her hand out and laid it against the top of his head. His hair was soft and faintly moist at its thin spot. She felt a bit silly, solemnly pretending her touch could calm the waters, while he went on having whatever trouble he was having in his dream; all the same she felt a rush of tenderness. In the morning she realized, with a start of recognition, that she had been cradling the fontanel, the soft part of a baby’s skull where the gap before the bones grew together always had to be protected. She must have been half-asleep herself. The whole shadowy remembrance of the gesture pleased and uplifted her. It made her feel like a simple, instinctively good person, capable of loving another adult in the unfiltered way one loved children.
Rhoda had rather hoped that Suzanne would help care for, or at least occupy, her sister. But as they grew older, the two children began to quarrel and fight actively. Suzanne was something of a bully, fond of closing her small hand into a fist and punching. Claire, being too much younger to fight back in any effective way, would scream before the blow was struck, so that any adult who rushed to the scene was faced with scolding Suzanne for something she hadn’t done yet, a weak position which made Rhoda irritated with them both. The result was that they were largely left to their own devices; Claire spent a good deal of her life in a state of weepy outrage and resignation over the maintenance of her rights.
The one place where they never fought was at their grandmother’s. Rhoda would leave them there for an afternoon and would return to find Suzanne quietly working at her coloring books while Claire scribbled in magazines, both kneeling on the floor and sharing crayons in the manner of serious draftsmen, workers in the same office. Rhoda was not surprised to find that her mother’s house seemed to bathe them in mildness and calm, as though they partook of the benign order evident in the arrangement of its furniture and the cleanliness of its waxed floors. She admired her mother’s deftness in dealing with them, the offhand way she relegated tasks to them without disrupting her own routine. But Rhoda was used to admiring her mother and hearing her admired; she regarded having such a mother as one of the ways she was superior to other people.
Rhoda did not remember, as a child, having quarreled much with her brothers in front of her mother. Her brothers had been so little (five and six years younger than Rhoda), almost another generation, hardly worth bullying. At home they had all been most occupied in keeping out of the way of their father, who shooed and swatted at them like dogs. Her brothers had never looked like her; they were both red-haired, with colorless lashes and soft features; their speckled ruddiness was completely different from Rhoda’s own brunette clarity. They had grown into fairly nice adults, presentable men who kept house with wives and went to business. (Andy, bespectacled and hardworking, was an engineer, while Frank, the youngest—sly and handsome, his hair darkened to auburn with Brylcreem—flitted from job to job.) Even as married men, their visits to their mother were frequent. In her presence they were full of anecdotes, confidential, excited—so that Rhoda sometimes had to tell them to stop acting like jerks. She had grown especially proprietary about her mother in the past few years, during which—of all of them—Rhoda was the one who had gotten to spend the most time with her.
“This is the only house those rotten kids don’t get crayon wax all over the floors,” Rhoda said.
Rhoda sat in her mother’s kitchen drinking tea while Suzanne and Claire, through a miracle of subtle directives on the part of their grandmother, acted as though it were their own idea to find and put away all the loose crayons. The tea was so hot it burned Rhoda’s tongue, but her mother swallowed it without seeming to notice. She said, “Did you know that President Truman refuses to have a valet? I was just reading.” Her mother was always telling her things like this. She was like the cosmic gossip with its eye on the sparrow; no item was too small or too broad to pass under her opinion.
“So who is he impressing that he knows how to dress himself?” Rhoda said.
“For a change he has some sense. With servants, I remember even when I was a little girl I thought so, there’s no privacy.”
Her mother’s family in Europe had been a household of substance. She had the best traits of the urban Jews; she spoke five languages (although she’d forgotten how to read Russian and her Polish and German were weak now) and she was shrewd in domestic matters (Rhoda remembered her, in hard times, straining spoiled milk into cheese and turning their collars). She could recall visits to Bavarian spas and an aunt who only washed her face in almond-cream, but underneath the baroque luxury she seemed to have been trained and prepared for contact with harsher facts; it was a truly European life, conducted without naïveté.
She had bound herself to a man whose unusual physical height and habitual refusal to be ingratiating she had mistaken, in the flush of her youth, for stateliness or integrity. She had married unhappily, for love; she had lived forty years with a husband who read the rotogravure and the obituaries while she went to Workmen’s Circle meetings; but she retained so much of her own will and shape and alertness in any situation, and she managed to infuse—partly through her socialism—whatever she did with wider life and radiant outlines, so that she seemed, of all women, the least constricted by necessity.
Rhoda had always assumed that in adulthood she would know how to do all the things her mother did; in her own house it sometimes surprised her that she did not. On visits, her mother’s company wasn’t always the most relaxing; at times she turned on Rhoda for having expressed an opinion that Rhoda had expected to be the same as hers, and had in fact formed in imitation of her (like this scorn of hers for servants—who could have anticipated that?). “She takes the wind right out of your sails,” Rhoda told Leonard, but she almost liked being bested by her mother; it let her rest from the responsibility of always being right herself.
Rhoda was riding home with the two children in the car, when Suzanne said, “I’m very strong. I’m stronger than Grandma.”
“A powerhouse you are,” Rhoda said.
“No, really. I can almost lift Claire off her feet by myself. Grandma doesn’t pick her up any more, she’s afraid she’ll drop her. She makes Grandpa come in and lift her up on the bed for her nap. I think Claire’s getting to be a fatso.”
Rhoda glanced at Claire, who looked very small and elfin strapped into her car seat and was certainly not getting to be a fatso. It occurred to Rhoda that her mother had been looking pinched, and wanting to go out less lately, and might not be feeling well.
In the evening she suggested to Leonard that he come with her to visit the next time—“You can look at her and see.” There existed a superstition between them that Leonard, being a pharmacist, was almost a doctor. But when he arrived with her at her mother’s on Saturday, he seemed to have forgotten the drift of their visit; he sat at the table, letting her mother keep getting up—to make tea, to warm the coffeecake, to find a block Claire lost under the sofa. “You should rest, you never rest, Ma,” Rhoda said. When her mother replied, predictably, that you got to rest enough
already when you were dead, Leonard nodded and said, “That’s what I always think.”
Under Rhoda’s cross-examination, her mother admitted that she had taken off some weight lately, but she attributed her loss of appetite to the new people who lived next door; they were always burning cabbage (“either that or they’re roasting rubber tires over there”). Leonard was willing to dismiss the topic of ill health; he was taking her mother’s word for it. They were laughing together. Sometimes Leonard looked foolish when he dropped his jaw and laughed. Her mother was flirting with him; they were great fans of each other. Rhoda felt left out—for once she was the somber worrier, nurser of a secret sorrow, while Leonard was hearty and loose, and had the wisdom of the light in heart.
On the ride home Leonard talked about the World Series being televised for the first time this year. Rhoda answered in a slow trailing murmur that was a sign of depression in her; she cared less than nothing about the Yankees, and she realized she was angry with Leonard. He had told her he would see about her mother, and he had not. She was alone in her worry now; she felt herself exposed and cast out to the unknown, and she marveled that she had ever thought that marriage would be the one safe spot in the world, and that Leonard’s sober good sense would interpret for her the muddle of human events and give it back to her as something clear and tolerable.
In the ensuing months Rhoda watched her mother closely. At first the evidence soothed her apprehensions; her mother could still answer the doorbell faster than Rhoda could get up; it was really very hard to think of her sick. When she started taking naps in the afternoon, she told Rhoda she was sixty-four and she was entitled. But in the winter Rhoda’s father let it be known that she complained of pains at night.
It was hard for Rhoda not only to imagine her mother weak and ailing, but to imagine her own life taken up with this. Insofar as Rhoda had ever thought about the future—especially as a young girl unmarked by choices—she had seen her fate as regulated by the household formed by herself and her husband: whom you married was what happened to you.
It was months later—almost a year—when they found that she really was sick and that the cancer would march slowly and incurably through her, predictably; it was a matter of time. Rhoda wanted to scream at Leonard that this was unbearable, that everything would be unbearable without her mother—but she knew this was unseemly—to say it would be to ignore, firstly, that she had Leonard there in her life, and also that he had lived through the loss of his own mother without finding it unbearable. But he had always been rather distant from his own parents; he seemed not to have known them very well, and had in fact shown much livelier feeling for Rhoda’s mother. Rhoda could tell he was shocked and aggrieved now; at night they held each other in bed, mute. She was grateful for the bulk of him—she thought she could feel him shaking slightly, she wasn’t sure—and then the contact of his embrace caused her to flood with feeling, which made her weaker. She felt, as keenly as she ever had, that they themselves were only children, stupid children.
Even Claire knew her grandmother was very sick, because they went to visit her every day, and she was usually in bed. In her bedroom the windows were always wide open, even in mid-winter, and she wore over her nightgown only a cotton batiste bed-jacket. Her breasts under the nightclothes were rounded against her body and discreet, like worn hills. Her gray hair, finger-waved in the front, was twisted and pinned behind. Kissing Claire, she called out, “There’s no reason to shut the door, Rhoda. Let some air in. Is there anything wrong with air?”
“You’re right, Ma,” Rhoda said. “When you’re right, you’re right.”
In the sunlight of the room Rhoda saw that the doctor was there, sitting in an armchair in the corner, and someone (Rhoda’s father, most likely) had brought him a cup of tea and a piece of cake, which he balanced on his knee. The doctor’s pants were loose, bagging in a crease under his belly and then smoothing over the swell of his paunch. He was faceless behind his black-framed glasses. He’s a fuddy-duddy, Rhoda thought, watching him lick the crumbs from his mouth. We need a hero coming to the rescue and we get a character actor here.
It was useless to blame him, especially when he was so crazy about her mother, who busied herself telling him how handsome he was. “The best medicine,” he said now, nodding at Claire. Claire was by the night table; she wanted to turn on the radio so she could “do ballet” to the music, swirling to show off her skirts. For reasons not clear to herself, Claire would swirl around and around in place, until the room swam and she made herself sickish. The doctor managed to leave during the performance.
Rhoda’s mother made them hush for the news broadcast. “President Truman should go back to selling suits,” she said. For years she had passed out leaflets, first in Eugene Debs’s and then in Norman Thomas’s reliably continuous campaigns, but during the war years she had warmed toward Roosevelt, so that now she considered herself betrayed by Truman’s fiscal policies, outraged like any taxpayer. Rhoda refused to argue with her, even for practice.
“I got the recipes dittoed up for you,” Rhoda said. “The secretary at the temple was a little snotty but she did a nice job.” One of Rhoda’s tasks in visiting her mother was to run errands for the Golden Age Group which her mother “helped out.” In her sixties Rhoda’s mother considered it interesting, since her own family was grown, to extend herself toward the elderly, sending them on Mystery Bus Trips, museum visits with kosher box lunches, and picnic outings on Memorial Day. At home now she busied herself compiling the group’s booklet, Secrets from New Jersey Kitchens. “Not for the bestseller list,” Rhoda predicted, “but it’ll pay for seconds on spongecake at their meetings.”
“You have to help me think of a way to get more men to become members,” her mother said. “You’re laughing, very funny, but the women all complain.”
“Have a jigsaw puzzle contest,” Rhoda suggested. “That’ll bring them in.”
“Wrong,” her mother said. “Free tickets to Minsky’s Burlesque, that they’d like. We should only check to make sure they all have hats to keep on their laps.”
Claire, who had been playing with her rubber doll on the floor, came up and rested her doll on the hump made by her grandmother’s knees under the blankets. Her grandmother took the doll and made it hop over the bedcovers and bite Claire on the nose. She spoke in a high voice for the doll, pushing the rubber neck so the head bobbed. “‘Ello, Claire. I’m just a little baby doll. Doesn’t anybody have a relief package of jellybeans for me?”
Claire hoisted herself up over the side of the bed and began to squirm toward her grandmother to get the doll back. “You’re a worm,” her grandmother said.
“Get down from there,” Rhoda said. “What did I tell you?”
Claire, who was three now and constantly active, was always climbing and crawling to get burrowed close to people. It annoyed Rhoda now that she refused to understand that she wasn’t allowed to move around on her grandmother’s bed, where her sharp little knees might well hit a painful place. She wailed in a bratty, surprised way when Rhoda pulled her off, and Rhoda was angry at her for getting that hurt, glowering look on her face. Everything was hard enough, and now Claire was in a snit, pouting and tossing her shoulders over things being the way they had to be, as though she could shake them off. “The princess,” Rhoda said.
“Claire, show the doll how you learned to salute like a soldier,” Rhoda’s mother said. And Claire brightened, shooting her hand up to the side of her forehead and giggling. I have to remember how she does this, Rhoda thought, how she gets the children to do anything. It was all going to slip away and be lost unless she remembered. She felt emptied and guideless at the possibility. Leonard will know, she thought. She wanted suddenly to get home to her own house, out of the sickroom and back into the warmth of her own kitchen, where there were preparations to be made for Leonard.
“Say goodbye,” Rhoda said. “Time to go—Grandma’s going to sleep, it’s time.”
Claire walked ar
ound the bed, hugged her grandmother, and took the doll from her hands. From the doorway she yelled back, “Good night! Sleep tight! Don’t let the bedbugs bite!” and blew kisses—“M’m wah!”
“Sarah Heartburn,” Rhoda groaned. “Always with the theatrical exits.”
It irritated Rhoda that Claire would try, with her emotional showiness, to act “fake” with her grandmother, of all people. But Rhoda’s mother seemed tickled; she waved them off, saluting.
At home much of the time between visits to her mother, Rhoda became obsessed with the look of the house, the placement of the lamps, and the way the shapes of the chairs and sofa went together. She had a sense that there was something too massive about the furniture, and that the wallpaper (a bottle green grass-weave) was too dark and had worn shiny in places, like an old suit. She was aware of changing tastes and the fact that the house had a murky-toned pre-war look (as well it might, since she hadn’t bought anything for it since)—all the same, she thought that what she had once chosen as admirable should still be admirable. The entire subject made her restless; she would have liked to transform everything without changing anything. She bought blond-wood end tables for the sunroom and a squarish worsted chair, and had the downstairs rooms hung with sandy, nubbly textured drapes—pointing out, as she described or displayed them to friends, the good sense of refurbishing with washable fabrics and informal colors. Although she spent considerable time dwelling on it, her eye was not good and the logic of her choices was often sounder than the decoration schemes themselves. “The gold thread in the curtains picks up the rose-beige in the carpet,” she would say, talking herself out of a niggling dissatisfaction. She did believe a thing once she said it, so that intercourse with friends served to ratify any uncertain bargains she made with herself.
She brought her mother swatches of fabric and they conferred about trends; her mother was even more watchful than she was to avoid what was passé. Her mother, with her natural interest in all things, would have considered it pitiable to be unable to form an opinion. Lately her absorption in material details had increased with her sickbed confinement. She had lost her taste for novels and for the socialist monthlies which piled up on her night table. Even her Life magazines, which Leonard brought from the store, were left unread.