by Joan Silber
Mrs. McPhearson took their coats at the door; she was a plain woman in a black dress, wearing a pearl necklace that seemed bound by gravity to settle into the hollows of her collarbone. Rhoda surveyed the living room with vague disappointment; the room was large, but instead of the dark, spindly Chippendale and Hepplewhite reproductions which Rhoda and her friends all had, or the boxy sectional sofas they had recently come to prefer, there were squat Victorian hand-me-downs. There was even a maroon velvet chair similar to one at home that Rhoda had considered throwing out, but here it looked, not floridly overstuffed, but chilly and settled in its corner.
Rhoda sighted Richard Fern and his wife, Evvie, across the room; they were the only people there Rhoda really knew. Leonard had persuaded Richard to take an interest in last year’s projects, so he too had been rewarded with an invitation. Evvie made her way to them, brushing aside guests who parted before her rustling urgency. “Rhoda!” she squealed. “You look elegant.” Rhoda was wearing black; she did have an air. Evvie looked jolly and tasteless in a flounced turquoise dress, but pretty: assured and innocent under all the makeup. Richard came up to join them and put his hands on both their shoulders. “Best-looking gals in the room,” he said.
At dinner Rhoda was seated between Leonard and a gentleman whose card identified him as Dr. Findlay, a thick-necked, red-faced man with graying hair. “Do you practice locally?” Rhoda asked. “I’m a surgeon,” he said. “I specialize in the biliary tract.”
“Ah,” Rhoda murmured, “so people come to you. From all over, I’ll bet.” He shrugged modestly, laying aside his grapefruit spoon.
Dr. Findlay waved away the maid who was attempting to put a plate of soup in front of him. “I can’t stand soup,” he explained to Rhoda. “Too messy. Only way to eat it is to lap it up like a dog. You can’t do that in company. At home that’s how I eat soup—my wife too—I taught her. Only way.”
“Oh, Dr. Findlay.” Rhoda laughed, getting the idea. “You’re a character.” Dr. Findlay stiffened.
“You could always tell people it was the French way,” Rhoda suggested. “At home whenever I burn something I tell my little girls that’s how the French do it. They’re too little to know any better. I used to teach French, so they believe me.”
Dr. Findlay showed no sign of being charmed by the cleverness of this. “Do you teach the girls to speak French?”
“Well, the oldest won’t say a word, but the youngest knows a little. I ask her, Quel âge as-tu? and she says J’ai SANK ans.” Rhoda’s voice squealed with stubborn perkiness as the sense that she was boring this man deepened.
“I know a doctor out your way,” Dr. Findlay offered. “Good man. Dr. Hofferberg. An internist.”
“We know them socially,” Rhoda said.
“He’s quite an interesting fellow. Bright, you know, witty. He has that younger wife with the remarkable figure. I was teasing him about her, I couldn’t help it—how does an old dog like you keep up the pace? I asked him. He said to me—You know what they tell you when you’re younger, that the best is yet to come. Ha, ha.” Dr. Findlay, in his amusement, sputtered sauce on his chin.
Rhoda was mildly disgusted. But her instinct to hold the man’s attention was stronger than her dismay at what impressed him. “One time,” she said, warming to the occasion, “nine or ten years ago, we were staying downstairs from them at a hotel and we kept hearing this thumping noise from their room.” She proceeded to tell at length the saga of Herb Hofferberg’s prank. She had thought the episode tasteless at the time, but in the face of Dr. Findlay’s amused snorts, she expanded the details, shaped a plot to it. At the tale’s end he tapped her on the arm by way of appreciation. “Fooled you, didn’t he?” Heads turned at the sound of Dr. Findlay’s laughter. Rhoda smiled, as though easily masterful.
After dinner they listened to a long stretch of speeches by civic leaders. Dr. Findlay performed a mock pantomime of dozing off and snoring for Rhoda’s benefit; she shook her head to feign laughing when he raised his head and winked at her. Leonard caught a glimpse of this and gave her a stern look.
When the speeches ended, they were free to rise, mingle, and prepare to leave. Rhoda turned to Leonard as though saving the last dance for him; she was ready for familiar company. Dr. Findlay reached from behind to shake Leonard’s hand. “You have a charming wife,” he said, putting his hand on Rhoda’s shoulder. “I’m keeping her,” Leonard said.
On the pathway across the lawn, amid the sound of goodbyes called out behind them, Evvie Fern sidled up to Rhoda and whispered, “Did you see the jewelry—did you see the rocks on some of those women?” Evvie’s husband, on Rhoda’s other side, said, “You know what I noticed—there was a lot of expensive bridgework there.” Richard was a dentist. “Several thousand dollars was walking around in the mouths of some of those people.”
Rhoda laughed. “That’s a good one.” Her high heels clattered against the flagstones as she shook off the Ferns and hastened down the walk. Leonard came up from behind her just as she reached the street; he was calling softly, “Why are you walking so fast?” in a tone of mild irritation.
“Oh,” she said. She was unwilling to look at him—she felt caught. For a moment her resources failed her. In the pause of awkwardness she rallied, and turned upon him her stiff but nonetheless winning smile, the last look of interest left in her that night. She took his arm. Only when they were home and Leonard had gone to sleep and she lay in bed reading her book did her features once again arrange themselves into the taxed and helpless look, the released strain, particular to the loneliness of those who are natural with no one.
Rhoda was rather proud of the job she had done preparing Claire for the first day of kindergarten. Claire knew the alphabet, she could write her name, and she could spell cat, dog, and mother out loud, which was as much as Rhoda could teach her without poaching on the school’s domain. The night before her first day Rhoda reviewed with Claire the names of children she had played with who would be in her class, but Claire, soaring with eagerness, was above such reassurances. “KINDAgarden,” she screamed, running through the house, and would not go to bed until threatened that a shortage of sleep would make her sick and absent.
Walking with Claire down the school’s hallway the next morning, Rhoda was startled by the din coming from the kindergarten classroom—a continuous wail of sound, like the roar of a crowd, marked by the claps of wooden blocks smacked together and occasional high shrieks—she had forgotten how noisy it always was in the primary grades; the walls were yellow tile, like a public restroom, and shouts echoed. Miss Stacey, the perennial-spinster teacher, stood at the door, looking girlishly eager, nudging the children inside.
Every toy in the room had been dragged forth by five-year-olds reckless with guesses at what to do and frenzied by the sudden saturation of company. A boy shrieked as he held a flat wooden puzzle over his head and overturned it so the pieces rained like pellets. Two girls fought over a miniature tea kettle, while groups of children chased each other, gasping and giggling. The boy who had discovered the checkers kept yelling, “Bombs away!” as he scattered the box’s contents. “Go on,” Rhoda said. She dropped Claire’s hand.
At one end of the room a wooden Junglegym loomed like a giant Tinkertoy; Claire climbed it to the top. When she hung by her knees, a boy screamed that he could see her underpants. “So what,” she said, climbing down. “Bye-bye,” Rhoda waved from across the floor, edging out the door.
Two weeks later Rhoda reported to Miss Stacey for a special consultation after school. When she returned home she took Claire aside for a serious talk, shooing Suzanne away. “This is private. Go play outside.”
“I understand,” she said, trying to look down at Claire gravely, “that the other children have been calling you a schmatah. Miss Stacey didn’t even know what it was. It’s an old rag.”
“I know,” Claire said.
“It’s not even something you call a person. She said the children run around all day screamin
g Schmatah Claire Taber at you.”
“They do not,” Claire said. “They never do.” The fibbing irritated Rhoda.
“You’re too shy. Miss Stacey says even when the other children ask you to play, you don’t play along.” “‘She’s very unaggressive’—I heard all about it—‘doesn’t assert herself.’ You have to learn to be pushier. That’s all there is to it. Real tough.”
Claire squirmed, skinny in her overalls. “I also heard that Rita Shepp and Janey Littauer have been nasty to you. That Rita made a fuss about not wanting to hold your hand for the Mexican Hat Dance.”
“She did not. Did not.”
“All right,” Rhoda said. “Talk’s over. Go play outside.”
Released, Claire ran out the door, past the front-yard shrubs, over the lawn (she was not supposed to run on the grass) across the street to where Judy lived. From the living room window Rhoda could see her standing in the Finches’ driveway, knocking on the screen door. Judy Finch was three years older and had been Claire’s friend ever since her family had moved to the neighborhood a year ago. Together the girls spent their afternoons warding off the attempts of Judy’s younger brother to play with them. He was actually a year older than Claire, but by Claire’s alliance with Judy she considered him a baby. Rotten kids, Rhoda thought. Remind me not to have them in my next lifetime. She indulged momentarily in guessing, like a shopper passing the time pleasantly, what else she might do. Be a person in white slacks who sat under palm trees drinking Bacardi cocktails.
For their honeymoon she and Lenny (she had called him Lenny more often then) had stayed a week in Bermuda. She had wanted the French Caribbean, which was beyond their budget. In Bermuda the air was clean and mild and moderate, intensified in midafternoon when the famous pink beaches had a hard, bright, holiday glare. Although neither of them drank as a rule, in the early evenings they sat in a café on the harbor and sipped exotic mixtures from pineapples, nursing them long after darkness fell and the lights shone in store windows. They admired the tactful manners of the waiters. “It’s a tiny little island,” Rhoda said. She had been very keen then never to be awed by anything.
She was amused, remembering. Certainly she had been nervous and wary before the honeymoon. During their engagement Lenny had presented her with a book called A Manual for Marriage. He had underlined in pencil the sentence, “It is the degree of affection between a married couple which truly determines the success of their sexual life together,” so that she wouldn’t think he was clinical simply because he was modern. They discussed the desirability of waiting to have children (she was glad not to have to argue about this), and he had sent her to a doctor, a friend of his, to be fitted for a diaphragm. Reading the book had excited her, but when she felt the prod and spread of the metal instruments measuring the mouth of her cervix, she was alarmed that it would be like that, mechanical and violating. It was not. It was active and orchestrated, with plotted falls and rises, and if she did not feel completion, what she felt in aftermath was a tenderness—a blurred sensation, like the faint swelling around the lips from kissing—and a deepened admiration for Leonard.
She had a good memory, which she did not often exercise; she could remember, for instance, the linen suit she had worn on the ship, and the street where she had bought it in Newark; also the unbecoming way she had worn her hair then, with those awkward puffs over the ears. God, the lipstick they had used in those days, like India ink: you had had to scrub with Brillo to get it off a coffee cup. Of her physical self she remembered chiefly that her waist had been trimmer and no blue veins had shown in her legs when she wore shorts. At thirty-six, Rhoda was aware that her small, long-nosed face had grown stronger of feature and more important-looking, despite certain textural losses in the skin. She was not poignantly aware of aging because she had no special attachment to her youth in any stage. Her childhood, admittedly better than most, she saw as full of needless stupidities and privations.
Occasionally a sense of the past gripped her suddenly. This morning she had been polishing the mahogany china cabinet in the dining room. It was a favorite piece—a Baker copy of a Sheraton sideboard—with seashell scrolls and narrow inlays of lighter wood along the borders of the drawers. As she had been taught to do, she dipped a cotton swab in lemon oil to get at the crevices. What a good girl I am, she mused lightly, rubbing so the shadings of burl, well-matched on the lower drawers, showed richly. In the flush of accomplishment and the faintly dizzying odor of furniture polish, she felt a sharp lowering into melancholy. She had an absurd and painful urge to show her mother what she was doing. Intensely and desolately she missed her mother. The lack of her was terrible.
As a rule she kept her eyes on the present. She had a liberal’s sense of the historical past as something you were always advancing from. In the waves of nostalgia that sometimes overtook Leonard, he had once or twice made her feel that she had neglected to notice things now gone. Her own opinion was that things (like Nipponware tea sets) or ideas (like Utopian Socialism) passed out of the everyday life around you because they died of natural causes, of revealed defects, and were replaced by better.
She knew, although they had never discussed it, that Leonard, since the early days of their marriage, had been disappointed by what he might have called her inadequate interior life. She saw it in the stiffening of his shoulders when, without thinking, she spoke to him when he was reading even a newspaper. The children, too, bristled at her voice breaking into their solitary games. This was unjust; she was more reflective than they knew. She was not so shallow or so careless as to take her own life for granted, for instance, but by this very knowledge, she clung fiercely to the surroundings she had made for herself, the objects of choice.
Rhoda watched the big horse-chestnut tree from the front porch. The tree was pretty in spring with its white blossoms; now the chestnuts were falling, their yellow innards squashing underfoot on the sidewalk. There was no use for them. The other day she had caught Claire trying to eat one, making a face at the bitterness.
She heard squalling from across the street where the children were playing. Suzanne had joined them. From the cries, Rhoda gathered that Suzanne had just hit Mikey Finch in the chest and pushed him into the bramble bushes. “You don’t hit somebody else’s brother,” Judy was yelling. “You’re a guest. Get off my property.” She pushed Suzanne onto the sidewalk. Wordless as an ogre, Suzanne was butting her head into Judy’s stomach. Judy shrieked for help, while Claire ineffectively pummeled her sister. “What is going on?” Mrs. Finch called out, slamming the screen door, and pulled the two children apart. “The sidewalk,” Suzanne said, breathing heavily, “is public property.”
“She hits everybody,” Judy was saying. “Even when you come to visit at their house, she hits you when you’re a guest. I would never do that. Nobody regular would.”
“You are noble,” Mrs. Finch said. “A saint.” She turned to the others. “Go home, you two. It’s suppertime.”
Rhoda fed the two girls their supper, and they waited with her for Leonard to come home. At the sound of his entry—the dog always heard it first—there was a great scuffle across the living room to the front door. Claire’s shrill voice was the loudest. There was no question that they preferred their father. It was natural, if painful.
Leonard was different with each of his children. With Suzanne he was discreetly companionable. Since turning nine she had been obsessively interested in bears (“Guess what my favorite animal is,” she demanded of anyone who came to visit), and he took her to the Bronx Zoo, where they stopped respectfully before each cage in the bear section and read the signs out loud to each other. On warm nights like this one, they played catch out of doors after Leonard had his dinner, and Claire (who was too little to go out after dark) could hear the smacking sound of the ball passing from hand to hand in the driveway. When they came indoors Claire wailed complaints until he tickled her and swung her so that she could touch the ceiling, mimicking her squeals of excitement until she bec
ame too wild and he had to put her down. She tried to climb his leg. “You’re a tree,” she said, shinnying. She grabbed hold of his sweater. “Stop that,” he said.
Claire continued; she could hardly believe he minded—only once had he yelled at her hard enough to frighten her, when she had spilled her milk three times in a row. “Get down from there,” Rhoda commanded. “You’re a witch,” Claire said.
“It’s somebody’s bedtime,” Rhoda said. “School tomorrow, remember?”
In the emptied days with both children away at school, a new and pleasant concern arose. Nat Shrimpke, Leonard’s partner, was finally about to enjoy his retirement to Miami: Leonard had bought out the older man’s share and was now full owner of the pharmacy. There was to be no fanfare about the changing of hands; the name—Front Street Quality Drugs—was to stay the same. Rhoda suggested an opening day gala with some small cosmetic item given free to each customer, but Leonard brushed aside the idea; “It’s not Macy’s basement, you know.” “All right,” she said, “I know when to mind my own business,” and she pulled her upper lip down like a flap, holding it stretched shut with her hand. “You look like Mortimer Snerd that way,” he said. He was very happy.
Surprisingly, what he did care about was the décor; he planned a major revision. After hours, he showed Rhoda the rows of small, dark drawers behind the counter. “You never can find anything in them. In the front too—it looks like a poor student’s garret with all this old brown wood around and the Latin labels. It needs lots of glass, I think—make it look airy and light. People always used to confuse learning with the antique, a little dustiness impressed them. Those days are gone gone.”