by Joan Silber
People like Maisie, on the other hand, seemed to suppose that in the course of things Rhoda would have to sell the house because her widowed state represented reduced circumstances, a need for smaller quarters. This was actually the reverse of the truth; with Leonard’s life insurance and the sale of the pharmacy, she had more unattached funds than she had ever had.
Rhoda was probably as good at money matters as most people; with the amount from the sale of the store, she bought—on different people’s advice—stocks of varying performance. Even the “duds” she held onto, in small silly amounts, pushing them out of mind as she would edge a disliked piece of clothing to the back of a dresser drawer. It was the good, bullish market of the fifties and her smart purchases covered her mistakes. She did well, remarkably well, and she attributed her triumph to her own shrewdness, rather than to a fortunate investment period.
She had never considered the category of luck (a passive lower-class notion: every evening Maisie’s husband gave the runner good money to play his lucky number and look what it got him). To show any respect for forces of fate outside your own will was, Rhoda felt deeply, to court disaster: to ask for trouble by giving it a name. Once, in the days after the funeral, Hinda had been helping her clean the house (keeping busy was good) and Rhoda, dusting a table, had knocked over a very pretty little glass candy dish, whose splintering pieces had scratched the table’s finish. “Oh, Rhoda,” Hinda had cried out, in a burst of whiny sympathy, “this sure isn’t a lucky time for you.” “You sound like your mother,” Rhoda had said curtly.
That you make your own chances was a tenet she had been raised to believe; like everything from her youth, it had the quality of having been hard-won, as well as the radiant example of her mother to give it authority. She believed against all evidence—not the Depression, or the Holocaust, or her own witness of the fitful, senseless rebellions of the body had bent the dogged textures of her thought.
The money was a great satisfaction. Every month that she received a dividend check she had a sense of her own rightness about things. Addie Shulman congratulated her. “What you have,” he said, “is security.” The house was hers for good now. She indulged only in small luxuries—better cuts of meat, expensive shoes for the children. She was, she said, “not a shopper.” Certainly the last thing she wanted was sweeping changes. For the house she bought, here and there, a fruit bowl or an antique umbrella stand, scattered objects in her own unsure taste.
Still, amidst the assurance of gradually increasing prosperity, the afternoons were long. She spent the mornings getting the house in order, working along with Maisie, on her days in, until the children came home to be fed; but by one o’clock she was weighed down by the sense of empty time that overtakes retired people. She sat in the kitchen eating her usual lunch, a mound of cottage cheese piled over lettuce (no eating from the container: like a colonist in an outpost, she was strict about keeping proprieties even when no one was looking); she heard from the next room the sounds of the TV set her father watched constantly now, and intruding on the mundane dairy textures, into her mouth came the watery taste of tears. She had slipped into a pool of self-pity; the blurry feel of it reminded her of the way she had “teared up” as a girl reading sad books. She thought of the scene in Mill on the Floss when Mr. Tulliver, his spirit broken at having his mill sold out from under him, mutters to his wife, “This world’s been too many for me.” In a glory of helplessness, she hugged the pain of this to her; twisting, she could remember Leonard’s voice and the feel of his whiskers faintly moist with the oil of his skin.
The thing was to get a job. Idle hands. Anything to get out of the house. But not teaching. It had been eleven years since she had stood in front of a classroom, and she remembered with a shudder the freakish nastiness of certain students, now long since grown, no doubt, into foul-mouthed and law-breaking adults. She had lost her nerve. She pictured the rows of potentially mocking students, sitting in wait with their various versions of Suzanne’s sour grimace, Claire’s nittering laugh. I’ve had enough of that at home, thank you.
Through an old friend of Leonard’s she heard of a part-time position as a doctor’s receptionist. It was, as predicted, an easy job. She was good at it, keeping the appointment books organized in her clean Palmer script. She worked from ten to three, while her father or Maisie gave the girls lunch.
She was adept at managing restless patients in the waiting room: “Now here’s a lovely magazine for a little boy with a runny nose.” None of them was really sick, but they weren’t well either, and the air of the office hung stale with nervous torpor. She swabbed the children’s bottoms for injections—a shot of penicillin was considered the most effective remedy and mothers left disappointed if their offspring were considered unworthy; Rhoda’s task was to expedite getting it done quickly before they knew what hit them. They always screamed a moment later and she mocked them for it—“It’s all over now, you big noisemaker”—dispatched them with lollipops and sent them, betrayed and tearful, on their way.
Bev Davis appeared one afternoon in Dr. Aaronkrantz’s office. Rhoda had seen the name on the appointment schedule with the word gastritis? pencilled beneath it. “Rhoda!” Bev called out. (Where did she think she was—a class reunion?) “You’re working. I think that’s wonderful.” It had been eleven months since Leonard’s death.
“How’s Abe?” Rhoda asked.
“Fine, fine. I’m the only hypochondriac in the family. The kids are fine too. But you look marvelous. I have to tell you, it’s fantastic the way you keep going on.”
“Where else is there to go?”
“Rhoda!” Dr. Aaronkrantz bellowed from the examining room. He did not affect a genial bedside manner. “I’m waiting in here, you know.”
“I hear ya, boss,” Rhoda called, scurrying. She returned a few minutes later, mildly embarrassed at having been caught in her capacity as an underling.
“With that voice,” Beverly said, “he could raise the dead. It’s a medical talent.”
“You’re next. Another minute.”
“Let me ask you—if I invited you for dinner when Abe’s cousin was there—the one who never got married—would you come? I mean, are you ready? I’m not one of those who would push you.”
Ready is as ready does, Rhoda thought wildly. “I wouldn’t miss one of your dinners for the world,” she said, feeling, as she shook her head in a vaguely contradictory gesture of assent, a wave of abdominal tightness like stage fright.
Go and see had been her mother’s dictum. In feeling herself under the directive to act, to go meet this man, she thought not of Leonard, but of her mother (she never thought about what Leonard would have wanted her to do—rarely did she even mouth the phrase—he wouldn’t have cared: he no longer cared).
On the upholstered bench in her bedroom Rhoda laid the stockings next to her dress to see how the shade went. She slid them up her leg and hooked them where the flesh escaped the satin panels of her girdle. Dressing with care for the occasion made her feel girlish: it was not a pleasant sensation—an adolescent nervousness trapped in the body of a thirty-seven-year-old. Claire scampered into the room out of intuitive nosiness and stared at her mother stripped to the waist. “Get over here,” Rhoda said. “You can hook this for me.” She had to sit down for the child to reach the fastening on her bra. In the drawer, buried beneath the slip she selected, were two foam rubber cones stacked together—falsies; silly things—she hadn’t worn them for years, not since the styles had changed. Once they had been standard, an expected artificiality like high heels. “Bonus bazooms,” Leonard called them. With no one to share their irony they lay, bereft of humor, personal and unsavory as clumps of used Kleenex. So much of physical life was raw and unseemly without him.
She dressed quickly, not stopping to look in the mirror until the effect was complete; the blue wool sheath was simple and stiff. Making-up was a business-like procedure for her; she rubbed rouge into her cheeks with the vigor of using an eraser. Thou
gh she considered herself good-looking enough, she was not in the habit of exploiting her looks as a way to please. Blotting her lipstick, she felt a stir of unwelcome excitement and a faint flutter of resentment toward the unknown, expectant male sitting in wait for her at Beverly’s house.
He was too thin, or thin in the wrong places. His clothes fit him badly. Perhaps he’d lost a great deal of weight recently. (She thought fleetingly of the movie Grand Hotel, when the doctor says to Lionel Barrymore, “When a man’s collar is three sizes too big for him, I don’t have to ask the state of his health.”) His gray sports jacket hung too long, like a zoot suit or a hand-me-down. He had thin lips and delicate eyebrows—a pale-skinned, dark-haired man—not bad-looking, but a bit shopworn.
He rose to shake hands. Decent manners. Eddie Lederbach. “I’m so glad to meet you,” Rhoda said, stretching her mouth in that smile that showed her teeth to good advantage and made her look almost cruel.
Beverly brought them all highballs, forgetting that Rhoda did not drink; a ginger ale was brought for her instead. “Rhoda’s just recently gone back to work,” Bev explained. “She’s working in a doctor’s office.” The man nodded, said nothing—was he shy?
“And what do you do?” Rhoda asked.
“I’m an accountant by trade. That’s my training. C.P.A. Worked for the government for thirteen years. Bureau of Internal Revenue.”
“Ooh, a tax man,” Rhoda murmured, shaking her finger at him. “You greedy guys are always taking all my money away.”
“Not me. No more. I’m in the private sector now.” He exchanged glances with Bev’s husband Abe.
Beverly began hustling them all toward the dining room. “Turn down the radio, Abe,” she called out, as she slipped into the kitchen. “No, Rhoda, please, you don’t have to help, really.” On the radio a woman’s voice was singing with perky gusto, Enjoy yourself / While you’re still in the pink.
“That’s me,” Eddie Lederbach said, as he held Rhoda’s chair for her. “In the pink.” He laughed silently. “A pinko in the pink. That’s how come I don’t work for Uncle Sam any more. Are you now or have you ever been.” He leered at Rhoda grimly. “You’re sitting next to a dirty Commie dupe of Moscow fellow-traveler spy traitor. Hope you don’t mind. It’s not catching.”
“I’m not worried,” Rhoda said. “What’s your job now?”
“I’m a bookkeeper for a company that makes mercerized cotton socks. You need any socks?”
“Thank you, no,” Rhoda said.
“I weave secret Communist messages into the toes of the socks. Ha, ha.”
Beverly tried to introduce diverse topics; they discussed MacArthur’s difficulties in Korea, Milton Berle’s crazy costume on his last show, and the advantages of early orthodontia for buck-toothed children. But Eddie Lederbach managed to return all conversation to the awkward and depressing subject of his own blacklisting. He had, in fact, considerably less to complain of than some people: he had admittedly once belonged to the Youth Against War and Fascism, and he had attended a few cell meetings of the Party in the thirties. At least he’d actually done something; it seemed, Rhoda argued, that it would be considerably more frustrating to lose your job when the accusations were totally made up.
“Don’t get me wrong, I think the whole thing stinks,” Rhoda said. “McCarthy should be locked in a padded cell somewhere.”
“Worse,” Eddie Lederbach said. “What I would like to do to him. Draw and quarter the bastard, lower him into a vat of boiling oil an inch at a time.”
“That’s not funny,” Rhoda said.
The worst of it was, aside from his overall aspect of being at loose ends, he was an attractive man. Mobile features, a good mime in his occasionally comic moments: he had probably once been charming. Before Leonard, who’d been broad-shouldered and short, she’d always been drawn to slim, boyish types. Eddie Lederbach’s hands were long and graceful, with soft, sparse hairs growing tenderly about the knuckles. She was not prepared for a complexity of emotions. Either she would encourage him or she would not. Her chest rose with the increase of heat in contemplating the question: a quickening of breath as a sort of test. She looked at his eyes—small and maroon-brown—but she knew from teaching school that you couldn’t tell anything from them—eyes were impersonal—the merest punk could have the mellowest eyes and be no better for it. His lips moved wetly in nervous speech.
“I couldn’t defend myself,” he was saying. “That’s what sticks in my craw. When I get up in the morning now, the first thing I think of is, it’s not fair. Sometimes I wake up shouting it in my sleep.”
There was an awkward silence. Nobody wanted to know what he did in his sleep.
“What are you—a whiner?” Rhoda said suddenly. “Complain, complain.” She made a clicking sound as though chiding a child. “The world is not such a fair place. Let’s face it.”
“You think there’s another world?” He smiled wanly.
“I’m not religious,” Rhoda said.
“Me neither,” he said—sprightly all of a sudden, cheered by any opinion held in common. Good God, he was still trying to make contact with her.
“I mean,” Rhoda went on, “anybody could drive himself into a frenzy just dwelling on his misfortunes. You could go bananas that way. We all could. You can’t just lie back and kick your heels in the air like a cockroach.” Bev tittered. “That ain’t the way,” Rhoda said, her voice low and goofy now. “You’ve got to remember the old Onward and Upward.” She circled her fist in the air in mock-heroics.
“Buckle down, Winsockee,” Eddie said sarcastically.
“Excelsior,” Rhoda said jubilantly. “Give ’em the old one-two.” She was pleased with herself as Beverly laughed and called out, “Oh, Rhoda, you could kid the absolute pants off anybody.”
“I beg your pardon,” Eddie said, laughing finally.
“Just a figure of speech,” Abe Davis grumbled, winking.
“Don’t take it literally,” Rhoda gasped. She had a sudden vision of Eddie Lederbach standing up and his pants falling in one slapstick swoop down to a puddle at his ankles. In lewd, clownish despair—“the poor soul”: he had neither the bulk nor the presence of mind to keep his trousers up. She was laughing.
“I’d like to take it literally,” he whispered, leaning closer to her ear and touching her neck with his fingertips.
She shook her shoulders, laughing harder, and sloped back in her chair away from him.
“Jokes,” Eddie Lederbach said. “This country has a wonderful sense of humor. Kick the underdog—that’s funny.”
“Oh, stop it already, for Pete’s sake,” Rhoda hissed. “We’re all fed up.” His face clouded—she had hit a bit too hard. Abe Davis had to contrive a string of compliments for the mashed potatoes in order to get them all talking again.
Later, when they were both leaving at the end of the evening (there was no need for him to see her home since she had come in her own car), he took her hand and said, “Well, it’s been very nice.”
“A pleasure,” Rhoda said. She felt a twinge of triumph in his obvious disappointment at having failed to interest her: mostly she wanted very much to get home. She drove through the dull, darkened suburban streets, down the block where the yellow bug-light shone warmly over her own front porch. In the shadowy foyer she brushed against the new umbrella stand; she hung her good fur coat in the downstairs closet, and moved, with the great relief of homecoming, through her own living room, where the mahogany furniture glimmered in the half-dark like blocks of marble. In her bedroom she undressed and took from the drawer her long flannel nightgown, a matronly and yet childish style; her body seemed very small within its cottony folds. She buttoned the neck and settled into bed; she was very tired; it takes a lot out of you, this wild social life I have, she thought drily. She felt at once virginal, tremulous, and weary.
The idea Rhoda had was that you have to begin somewhere. Once she declared this, however, what began was a new and deeply distasteful stage in wh
ich the bleak dignity of her widowhood was exposed to careless mockery. She was subject to the suggestions of well-meaning friends regarding their unmarried brothers-in-law, their husbands’ divorced business partners. The small claims they made for their offerings (“Gregory Peck he’s not, okay?”) struck Rhoda as callously disrespectful to her. At dinner parties she would find, invited on her behalf, men with bad teeth, loud ties, overdue bills—men who had not read a book in ten years—men who were so clearly out of her sphere of social compatibility that had they been women she would have behaved toward them with undisguised condescension. As it was, she laughed at their jokes, watched coldly but without protest as they slid their arms over the top of her chair. Occasionally she accompanied them to the movies, permitted her inert hand to be held in the moist unwelcome contact of their palms. She saw the need to make an effort. She felt like a fool. She began to spread the word among her friends: “Don’t bring me any more leftovers.”
Rhoda was beginning to hate her job—just when the children were getting used to her being away. At first Claire had sobbed, “You’re never home” now they both claimed they were much too big to care whether she was there for lunch.
She returned home from work one afternoon to find Suzanne playing with her chemistry set on the kitchen table, trying to impress Ina Mae Kaufman, the third most popular girl in the fifth grade, with the way the red liquid turned to green (Rhoda herself understood little of these experiments). “Big deal,” Ina was saying. “I didn’t think the litmus paper was so neat either.” It was the fashion in the fifth grade to be negative.
Suzanne set the test-tubes in their rack and reached out to give Ina Mae a “feeny bird,” a rap on the skull with flicked fingers, as Ina ducked away, screaming, “Get away from me!”