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Household Words

Page 10

by Joan Silber


  “There’s more blankets in the closet at the head of the stairs. I appreciate this,” Rhoda said. “The girls are asleep, I suppose? Use your napkin, Pop.”

  She awoke with a deep, paralyzing wish to sleep herself back to another time. She thought—not of Leonard’s face—that was blocked from her, as if she sought as she slept, with her hand over her eyes, to keep the light away—but of his body’s outline, the particular barrel-shape of his ribs, and the chest, bifurcated and hard under the coating of light brown hairs. The absence of his form under the covers of the bed next to her engendered in her a sudden rage, as though she’d been robbed in the night. His bed was undisturbed, the chenille spread tucked properly around the pillow. She felt panicked and afraid—an actual physical shudder came over her, and then she had a dreadful urge to beat at the covers of his bed, to make him come out. She wanted to get up and look for him.

  She was awake now with a restlessness of emergency; her head buzzed with plans, but in fact she had hardly moved; she lay back weakly against the headboard. She felt unequal to the task of stirring herself and dismounting from the bed without help, and she mourned again doubly that Leonard was not there to help her in her mourning.

  She heard the children’s voices from downstairs, and there was the smell of melting butter, which seemed alien and unfitting. She put on her robe and made her way down the steps. Downstairs in the kitchen she found that her father had made breakfast for both the girls. He had spattered a great deal of batter across the surface of the stove, but the girls were sitting peaceably at the dinette table, apparently content with their somewhat leaden-looking pancakes. Either Claire or Suzanne had made the request. Pancakes had been Leonard’s specialty—a weekend treat—which Rhoda had not been “allowed” to make, because the children identified them as an exclusively male production.

  Suzanne was rotating forkfuls of pancake in a pool of syrup on her plate—oafishly quiet, as always, but not troublesome. “They were very good, Grandpa,” Claire was saying. “I’m just too full to finish.” She patted her stomach. He touched his knuckles to the child’s sticky cheek; the hand shook faintly. “Had enough?” he demanded. Claire nodded and gave him a forced, close-lipped smile. How can a five-year-old humor a grown man? Rhoda thought. The sight of it made her feel weakened and grateful at the same time.

  How clever of the girls, with their child’s rigid concern about these things, to think of a way not to pass a single Sunday without pancakes. They were already learning how to make substitutions. They were like ducklings ready to be brooded by any barnyard animal, fed with an eyedropper.

  Her father’s quivering pleasure was unnerving, a drain on everyone’s generosity. After breakfast he settled himself in the sunroom and read a paper someone had left there the day before. He was still there in midafternoon, when Rhoda went upstairs to rest. She listened while he answered the front door when the bell rang, and she could hear Hinda, coming into the foyer, trying to ask him questions about himself (he was not at all hard of hearing, but people had a tendency to think that if they spoke more loudly to him, they would get more of a response). Then Hinda was asking, “Is she sleeping now?” and Rhoda, who had been about to get up, suddenly yielded to the temptation of letting them think she was alseep—she stiffened with the sensation of eavesdropping.

  Hinda’s husband Stanley was there with her; he was saying, “Let’s go, doll, we’ll come back later.” He would be chewing gum, Rhoda thought, and wearing some floppy nylon sportshirt that looked like a pajama top. He was probably edging Hinda out with his hand at the small of her back, genteelly guiding her through the doorway with a proprietary tenderness; he was very nice to Hinda, but all the same there was something disgusting in this image of this—in all of it; Rhoda could hardly stand it from where she was.

  The doorbell rang again; someone was answering it (probably Hinda). Rhoda could hear several voices—Andy’s wife, Lainie, was calling down the walk, “Well, don’t leave it there—bring it in from the car anyway.”

  When Rhoda finally came downstairs (“Look, sleeping beauty!” Andy said) both her brothers were in the living room with their wives, all of them still clustered around the entryway. Claire was showing Hinda how she’d learned to do a split, and Suzanne was kneeling and trying with her teeth to break the string on a large cardboard box someone had put on the floor.

  “We just stopped by to bring you something that should be very handy,” Andy said.

  “I see the box,” Rhoda said. “Thank you.”

  “It’s a humidifier to keep in the bedroom. You were complaining that the heat in the house is so drying. You turn this on and it keeps the air moist all night; you sleep like a baby.”

  “This is not a noisy kind,” Frank said. “It’s the top-of-the-line model.”

  “Isn’t that a nice idea?” Hinda said.

  “You’ll see—it’ll give you such a feeling of breathing fresh air indoors,” Frank said.

  Rhoda thought this was a childishly peculiar present for them to have chosen for her. They were carrying it up the stairs, eager to install it at once (Frank’s wife, Marsha, made them take a towel to put on the carpet under it); they were calling down to her—did she want it by the window or on the floor in front of the night table?

  “They’ll be futzing around with that for hours,” Lainie said. The wives gazed fondly up the staircase. Rhoda sat across from her two sisters-in-law, who had settled themselves on the sofa. They were years younger than Rhoda—girls really, in their full skirts and wide belts—slender, good-natured, very proud of lending their husbands for the day.

  Stanley wanted to get Rhoda a drink, it would be the best thing in the world for her. In his politeness he kept putting his hand behind the back of her chair, as though he had to support the upholstery. Hinda told him to go see if there was any soda in the house, if that was all Rhoda wanted. Alone with the wives, Rhoda listened to the sounds of other people’s husbands doing favors for her in her house. They were arguing about an extension cord upstairs; Stanley was hacking at an ice tray in the kitchen sink.

  The women let her be quiet for a while. Marsha pretended to be delighted when Claire pranced around with Marsha’s scarf wrapped around her waist as a skirt, and Lainie and Hinda let Suzanne show them her card trick over and over, swearing they could never guess the secret. Stanley was in the sunroom, looking at the bookshelf (most of the books were Leonard’s). Rhoda sat holding her wet glass in her lap, until her brothers came down from upstairs; the women got up to join them, and stood waiting while the men brought them their coats, and then—all six of them kissing Rhoda’s upturned face—they formed into couples again and they left, two by two, walking across the lawn to their own cars.

  Her father stayed for another two days, managing to be something between a help and a hindrance—an eyesore always. She was, even in the fatigue of mourning, snappish with him; he shrugged and remained unalterable in his fixed private notion of duty—even after she sent him home, he returned for visits several times a week, and on weekends.

  In the month after Leonard’s death, she had more conversation with her father than she’d had in years. Now she welcomed having people around her. She was aware, all the time she spoke to them, of Leonard’s image tugging at her mind, but the effort of double concentration made this bearable. In a blurred fashion she was glad to have him with her in this way, so that talking to anyone was a help to her at this time; it was a secret device for keeping his visitation with her.

  Only at night she wept with an unspeakable bitterness. It seemed to her then that she had to school herself, to harden herself against his wounding image, in the way, as a young girl, she had always known to harden herself against a boyfriend who no longer came calling for her.

  Her conversations with her father were rough and peculiar—from the gruffness of his personality, which she imitated in speaking to him—and because he spoke to her in Yiddish, which, as the language of her childhood, came handiest to her only in s
haping certain thoughts. (It was not a language she associated with Leonard, although they had had jokes in it.) Her father liked to tell her things from the newspaper—Marines returning from Korea with bizarre injuries remedied by miraculous prostheses, mothers throwing their children from burning buildings, flood victims finding their family heir-looms floating intact downriver. Rhoda understood everything he said to her, but in the unfamiliarity of certain words for catastrophes, it struck her how much of her life had gone by without any need to refer to these things.

  He liked to recount his news tidbits to her as she prepared supper. “Talk in English,” Claire would squeal, climbing up her grandfather’s knee. He sat on a red aluminum stepladder near the kitchen door, a hot spot (too near the radiator) which he had chosen for himself exactly the way a dog picks a quiet retreat under the table which is nonetheless in the way of everyone’s feet.

  In the ensuing weeks Rhoda realized that the rest of the family now viewed her and her father as being in each other’s care; matched by default. Not one of his three children was fond of him, Rhoda least of all; ironically, her contemptuous refusal to fear him as a child had given her the reputation of being able to “handle” him.

  To the extent of his capacities, he was interested in the grandchildren—especially Claire, who was the most affectionate—and on Sundays he brought them poppy-seed rolls from a bakery in Newark, and sometimes little gifts; once a toy harmonica for Claire, which she spent the afternoon bleating tunelessly. His visits did help fill the house, and Rhoda found herself expecting her father to be there often, his dry cough in the background of her housework like a radio half listened to.

  She complained of his messy, depressing habits to her brothers, but in essence she succumbed to the mounting conclusion of his ever more frequent presence. So, almost by degrees, her father moved in with her, taking over Suzanne’s room; Suzanne, who did not protest, was put in Rhoda’s ample master bedroom. She was given the right-hand closet and the right-hand dresser for her own use. For a nine-year-old, she was neat in her habits.

  Rhoda had moved Leonard’s clothes up to the attic to make room for Suzanne, but she left his ties still on their rack on the door of his closet, and a few shirts of his hanging inside. Suzanne left them exactly as they were; she arranged her own belts next to the ties. She was remarkably self-contained for her age, not silly and restless like Claire, who would have been impossible to live with in the same room. She was husky and broad, slow-moving and clumsy; no wonder that she had once liked bears so much. She could be very stubborn at times, refusing to answer questions she didn’t like—an unsmiling child. At night she breathed with the glottal thickness of heavy animals.

  A re-shuffling: into the gaps, lesser shapes were pressed, makeshift but sufficient. The changes in her household lent to Rhoda a sense that she was doing something. It recalled to her the pride of wartime resourcefulness in ersatz, when they had poured steaming water over canned tuna and called it chicken. For the Duration. Her dreams were surreal, but in her waking life she continued to have a precise if distant notion of the personalities around her, as when in teaching the lower grades she had touched the tops of the children’s heads to count the number present.

  She had heard that widows sometimes, forgetting their husbands were dead, thought of things they must tell them later, or imagined themselves discussing everyday events with them. What happened to Rhoda was that her own thoughts began to rise up in Leonard’s voice; she began to use his expressions for her own sensations, the way she might, after reading a book, find herself thinking in the syntax of the author. Idle, fugitive sentiments were tagged with his style: “Well-done, A-1,” she would think, eating a piece of cake, or “No kidding, kiddo” (another expression of his) when she agreed with a commentator on the news. She could hear his voice, the familiar, barely rising inflections and low tones, not as though he were there keeping company with her, but as though his spirit had overtaken her mind. She was smothered beneath it, and she felt that a part of her was withering under the weight: certainly she was losing her concentration. It reminded her of her fear in the early days of their marriage when she had suddenly seen the terrible ultimacy of what it meant to live with someone: she could not get away from him.

  Now he slept in her brain like a worm in an apple, and fed off her mental processes; this was what it meant to be eaten away by grief. Only this wasn’t grief—she was past the pain of fresh mourning, wasn’t she?—this was the slow erosion of personality by the habitation of some other. It was most like those mothers who died from toxemia carrying dead fetuses within them. She was sorry she had ever let her life be so linked, so ingrown, with that of another person. It was too late to escape now, but she was certainly sorry she’d ever had children; they were like the past, they clung and clung.

  “You’re in a good position, Rhode,” Addie Shulman said, in the line of counsel as her accountant. “The business has no debts hanging on it. The store is fresh, neat, modern-looking. Since the war Americans love drugs. I should’ve been a doctor myself—they’re cleaning up, the pill-pushers. But seriously—I’m serious now—one thing you should know: Sell now. Don’t wait. You think I’m rushing you, but what you’re selling also is a name, a reputation. Keep the place closed too long and it’ll expire. A good name is beyond price; it happens to say so in the Talmud.”

  “And in the Wall Street Journal,” Rhoda said.

  For three months Rhoda had applied herself, with Addie’s guidance, to the store’s accounts. It distressed her that over fifteen hundred dollars was owed in back charges by delinquent customers. She mailed out urgent bills, threatened the addressees with a collection agency; in a frenzy of aggravation she made personal phone calls. Mrs. Leshko, of all people, refused to pay her ninety-seven dollars and forty cents. “What are you bothering me, an old woman?” she wheezed into the phone. “You’re well-off now, everybody knows he left you a bundle. What is my piddling bill to you? Crap, chicken feed.”

  Even Addie tried to persuade her not to get all worked up over accounts outstanding. “It’s a write-off. Do yourself a favor, forget it. We’re talking about a solid business of respectable size. Penny-wise and pound-foolish is you.”

  This meant that Rhoda had to relinquish her hold on the store. Briefly she weighed the possibility of taking it over herself, of acting as manager and hiring a young pharmacist fresh from school, but she was halted in her considerations by the memory of her sole sales experience. In high school she and Florence Pinskow had sold hats in the Five & Ten. On the heads of unwitting women they placed the world’s ugliest caps, nodding as the ladies lowered their chins before mirrors, smirking as they left with reckless purchases in hand. It was all very funny then, but had left Rhoda with a correct image of the sales counter as a gate behind which you were held captive audience to a parade of the world’s pettiness and short tempers: too old for that now.

  Addie thought he had a buyer. The Sav-Mor Discount Drugs chain was showing interest; a fellow had shown up at Addie’s office and had been given a tour of the premises. Rhoda balked at the price he offered. She sent word that he had mistaken her for a charitable institution. The man came to visit Rhoda privately, a balding, middle-aged Gentile in a wrinkled brown suit. He was not, he explained, the minion of a large, affluent corporation, but a poor slob trying to get a franchise. In southern California he had run a thriving drug and stationery center in a shopping mall, but his wife had left him for a blond beach bum with a tattoo, and he had come east to make a new start. He had a lovely new wife, a baby on the way, and he could go no higher in price.

  Rhoda was not pleased to hear the sordid minutiae of his personal history, but she was persuaded that he was not a wily person, and the thought of further negotiations fatigued her. She relented: the man’s sweaty, profuse joy was a pitiful and satisfying sight. Four months later he hired carpenters to knock through the stockroom partition and install a lavish fake-marble lunch counter with chrome and vinyl stools (not since th
e war had the place had anything so crass as a soda fountain). Rhoda was disgusted at the man’s duplicity, his self-debasement in pleading false penury—she hated to go past the premises—but she kept, oddly, her original smugness in the transaction. Then and for all time she had formed the idea of her own financial competence.

  Now that the store was sold, Rhoda found people asking if she planned to put the house on the market. Maisie in particular nursed a nagging fear on this point, despite reassurance. Sylvia Shepp wanted to know, in the midst of an otherwise impersonal conversation when they met in the library parking lot, “So are you thinking of getting out, Rhode?”

  “Out of where?” Rhoda said. She could hardly imagine where people thought she might go. There seemed to be two suppositions on the subject. People like Sylvia thought she might want to hop off with the children to some place like California or Florida, out of a belief in the outside solution, the open opportunity. The very vagueness of the possibilities seemed to them thrilling and visionary. They were so tickled with themselves at having thought of this that it reminded Rhoda of a puzzle Suzanne made everyone try (she liked mathematical puzzles)—it was an insoluble maze, there was no way to reach the center without crossing a line or lifting your pencil, unless you made a great loop outside of it: the trick was to think of this.

  Rhoda always heard, in examples like Sylvia’s of a cousin who absolutely loved living in Denver, the underlying assumption that everyone really longed to go to such places. Rhoda had very few such desires; all her expectations had centered around her house—that settlement by slow choice invented, furnished, and populated, lit from within, the same house in which she was already living and in which she intended to continue to live.

 

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