by Joan Silber
“How about,” Rhoda suggested, “clearing off the kitchen table so you can have some good old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”
“Oh, boy,” Suzanne groaned sarcastically. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”
“The boy,” Rhoda intoned, beating time with a spoon at the kitchen sink, “stood on the burning deck, / His feet were full of blisters. / He tore his pants on a red-hot nail / So now he wears his sister’s.” The girls, unfamiliar with the original poem (a staple of recitations in Rhoda’s childhood) failed to find this wickedly amusing. “Oh, Mother,” Suzanne grimaced. “Ina, for Christ’s sake, would you please pass the jelly? I’m starving, you know.”
“You poor old thing,” Rhoda said. “You’re so hungry you could dydee-dydee-dydee-die.” Ina giggled. Rhoda poured a glass of milk for the guest. “Say when,” she suggested.
“I hate milk,” Ina yipped.
“Oh, we never serve milk in this house. This is cow juice. Don’t be fooled by the carton.” Rhoda smiled mysteriously.
“She thinks she’s funny,” Suzanne said.
“Four,” Rhoda said to Claire, who was setting the table. Ina had agreed to stay for dinner, thus raising Suzanne’s status in her class for at least a week. “Grandpa’s not eating with us.” Her father was now taking most of his meals by himself, which was better, really. “No, the knife goes with the blade facing in. You know that. It’s all crooked, Claire, it looks like you just threw the silver on the table. Come here and do it again.”
“I don’t care,” Claire said. “You never say I do it right.”
“Nobody,” Rhoda warned, “likes a whiner.”
“Whiners have to go to bed early,” Suzanne shouted, streaming into the kitchen. She slid on the waxed linoleum and stopped just behind Claire, whom she jabbed sharply in the ribs. Ina came from behind. They were keyed-up and noisy from having just spent an hour sitting absolutely still before the TV set. The dog circled and skidded around them, and then in a fit of old-dog excitement (he was twelve now), he lowered his head and barked a series of loud hoarse yips at Ina. “Don’t get him going. Don’t be so wild,” Rhoda said. Timmy, who had stopped barking, wagged his tail slightly, walked to a corner, and lay down, sighing. “You can be seated now, ladies,” Rhoda said. “Dinner is served.”
She slid lamb chops from the broiler onto the girls’ plates—all except Suzanne, who was served a dry little well-done hamburger, as always. A purist, she would eat almost nothing substantial but chopped meat, and no dessert that was not vanilla. Rhoda had lost interest in trying to force her. “I believe,” she would say, defending her indulgence before other mothers, “that meal time should be a happy time.” Claire, although more pliable, was also eccentric about food. She had confessed once that the thought of buttons (of all things) made her gag. Tonight she disdained cooked carrots for some secret reason. “Sensitive creatures,” Rhoda sniffed. “How did I get stuck with two snobs? Some day you’ll learn that the world is not your oyster.”
“What’s an oyster?” Claire wanted to know.
“Don’t ask,” Rhoda said. “That’ll really make you choke.”
“This is good,” Ina said, gluttonously gnawing on a bone.
“Suzanne is a doodyhead,” Claire whispered to Ina Mae, then smirked crookedly, just as Suzanne’s hand reached out to whack her on the back of the head, hard enough so that Claire’s chin hit the table. Claire shrieked.
“You were asking for it,” Rhoda said, over the din of Claire’s bawling. “I have no sympathy for you. Stop crying. Let me see—you’re not hurt. You can stop crying now, do you hear me? No, don’t try to scratch your sister—do you want a spanking? Is that what you want?”
“You’re always hitting me,” Claire screamed, turning on her mother suddenly. “Every day I get hit. Every single day.”
Rhoda was taken aback: it was true—but just little smacks. Now Ina Mae would go home and tell her parents that Mrs. Taber was a child-beater. “Why can’t you be good then?” Rhoda was shouting. “Go upstairs. Just go upstairs and get out of my sight. And you, young lady,” she said, turning to Suzanne, “are just lucky that I won’t say certain things to you in front of a guest. Consider yourself lucky.”
Suzanne knew enough to say nothing in reply, and the three of them, after Claire’s sobbing departure, ate their suppers in sober quiet.
Rhoda had trouble staying asleep that night; she kept waking up out of what seemed to be short fitful spells of rest. In her darkened bedroom she glanced hopefully at the windows, half-covered by blinds, for a sign that the night was beginning to break into respectable daylight. She had never been one to sleep late, even on weekends. “An old work horse,” she would say of herself, pretending ruefulness, but she sneered at neighbors who spoke of languishing in bed past ten o’clock.
Lately, however, her pattern of early rising had grown excessive even to her judgment. She was awake at five-thirty, vainly adjusting her body to logically restful positions, until she resorted at last to sitting up and perusing, puffy-eyed, her latest book from the library. In the bed across from her Suzanne slept on, oblivious to the reading-light and the rustling of pages. Rhoda would take no sleeping pills, despite the packs of samples, sent to Leonard, piled at the back of the linen closet with other miscellany.
At seven o’clock Rhoda let the covers roll down her knees and stepped across the narrow aisle separating her bed from Suzanne’s. Suzanne lay on her side, the blankets pulled about her tightly like a shawl. Only her nose and forehead showed above the turned-down sheet. Rhoda slipped into bed beside her, nuzzling against her back and stroking the child’s springy hair, light-colored like Leonard’s. Suzanne twisted slightly; Rhoda could tell by her breathing that she was awake now. She lifted the hair to kiss the back of her neck, which was pale and nacreous like the underbelly of a trout. Suzanne wore her favorite pajamas, old and almost-outgrown seersuckers with violets on them. She was ten, going on eleven now. Rhoda hugged the soft, handy, familiar shape. “Snuggleworm,” she said. “I’m with you, Shooby Shoo.” She began tickling Suzanne under the arms.
Suzanne squealed, but not with delight. “Mind your own business,” she wailed.
“Look who’s on her high horse,” Rhoda said, and continued to tickle her.
In the fall of 1952 Rhoda quit her job with Dr. Aaronkrantz and occupied herself with occasional volunteer work for Adlai Stevenson’s campaign. She had a great feeling, she said, for the decency of the man. (In a remote way Stevenson reminded her of her husband; they had the same build, for one thing.) She had no feeling at all for Dr. Aaronkrantz, who had been permanently insulted by her suggestion that he install an intercom system (he said, “With a voice like mine, who needs a gimmick?”); her brother Andy, with his penchant for nicknames, had dubbed the good doctor “the water buffalo.” All very well to wisecrack about it, Rhoda said, quite another thing to daily shudder in her alcove and repeat very softly, “I’m not deaf, you know.”
It was touch and go as to whether working for Dr. Aaronkrantz had been any worse than canvassing door-to-door in a Republican neighborhood; however, Rhoda’s feelings about politics were not deep or passionate, and since her daytime visits were largely with women, the exchanges were polite if curt. “Next year I can sell Fuller brushes,” she told Hinda. “I’m getting a good technique for getting my foot in the door.”
On one occasion a woman actually did want to argue about how many square miles of territory the Democrats had handed over to the Kremlin. Rhoda said, “Oh, we all know what an old tired issue that one is,” and turned away, having, she thought, scored her point. The woman called after her as she walked off. She seemed grandiose and reckless, croaking her phrases from the Georgian portico of her house, and although Rhoda was the one campaigning, it surprised her how hotly real all of it was to this woman.
Since leaving her job Rhoda was home more often with her father. In good weather he sat for hours on the front porch, reading his newspaper or staring blankly before him with
the idle gaze of a convalescent. He remembered closely what he read. Elizabeth Taylor, he announced, should never have married that bum Nicky Hilton, and he hoped her new husband wasn’t running around on her either, she was still just a baby. “She’s a personal friend of yours?” Rhoda said.
One damp fall afternoon he shuffled into the kitchen shaking his head dolefully. “So who did Rita Hayworth jilt this time?” Rhoda asked.
“The lady from across the street,” her father said, “the one with the red hair that comes from a bottle?”
“Mrs. Finch,” Rhoda supplied.
“Finch. She lets the delivery boy from the A & P put his hand up her skirt.”
The thought of Sally Finch’s tight wool skirt hiked up above her knees was not a pretty picture: maybe she couldn’t help herself. “Is it your business?” Rhoda started to say, and then she saw her father smirking. “Your mind is going,” she yelped. “With your bifocals, what do you know? You refuse to have your prescription checked. What are you saying—you can’t even see straight.”
“I know what I know,” he said. “In the doorway he did it. Right up her dress between her legs he was putting his hand to feel.”
It was a joke too dirty to be funny. Rhoda kept his vicious gossip to herself, where the burden of the secret made it gnaw at her thoughts. For a week she was distressed with visions of a pompadoured teenage boy reaching up to explore the moist helpless parts of Sally Finch; sometimes, too, she imagined her father’s labored breathing and saw his palsied hand stroking the breast of a woman.
Sally Finch, under Rhoda’s observation, seemed normal enough, a beak-nosed housewife who happened to dye her hair: not a crime in the state of New Jersey. This was not the last of her father’s tale-bearing, despite Rhoda’s announced scorn. Franny Moskowitz, a perfectly nice high-school girl who practiced her cheerleading routines in the driveway, he said wore no underwear. “Right outside for everyone on the street she does it—high kicks, splits.”
“What are you—out there with a telescope?” Rhoda said. “At your age. It’s pathetic. Read a good book for a change.” She had little doubt by this time that his information was of his own diseased manufacture.
It was all too vivid—a pornographic movie thrust suddenly upon the orderly walls of her household. “Only the fact that you speak in Yiddish makes you fit to have in the house with children,” she told her father. In a real way she had no use for these things. Two years ago she had been a natural wife in all respects, compliant and eager. Now the thought of sex had become foreign and outlandish to her, overheated, something multi-limbed creatures might do on the moon, or like the savage, invented games of childhood she half-remembered with mixed shame and wonder.
Still, it was her father who, with a clumsy effort at tact, first brought the news that Stevenson had lost the election. (Rhoda had watched some of the coverage on television the night before, but it tired her eyes to look through the set’s domed magnifier with its greenish tinge, and the state-by-state count had bored her, until she’d fallen asleep.) Her father shook his head as he thrust the morning paper in front of her, with a rather handsome show of sympathy, since he himself felt little interest, and had had to be coaxed into letting himself be driven to the polls to vote.
“You know what he says? He gave a beautiful speech about losing,” her father told her. “Beautiful.”
“What could he say?” Rhoda snapped. She was feeling bitter that all her legwork had been for nothing. She bit at her toast testily.
“Go, read it yourself. Don’t listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
Her father cleared his throat. “He says—he was quoting Abraham Lincoln—he says he’s not laughing or anything, he knows he lost—but he’s too old to cry.”
Annie Marantz came by in the afternoon to drive her over to the campaign headquarters, where they were already starting to clear out the office. “Who would’ve thunk it?” Annie said. “For nineteen years I’ve been a registered Democrat—all of a sudden I’m on the losing team again.”
“So close, too, damn it,” Rhoda said. “And I went and bought a new dress for the victory party they didn’t have—isn’t that always the way?”
“Don’t tell me. And I had a fellow all picked out for you, a nice bachelor from my electoral district—I was going to stick my foot out in front of him at the party so he’d fall at your feet.”
“I’ve got bunions—he wouldn’t have been impressed.”
“Well, he’s in the car waiting for us now—I’m giving him a ride, too. Take a good look.”
He was—Rhoda saw, as she slid into the front seat and swiveled around to nod at him—one of the fat, forty, and foolish variety. He lit up when he saw her, and crouched forward in the back seat to listen to her repeat his name. He was wearing a plaid golf cap. The car moved forward, Rhoda’s shoulder lurched. She gave him as broad a smile as she could with her neck twisted.
7
THE THANKSGIVING OF 1952, by an overlapping lack of foresight from different branches of the family, Rhoda and the girls were left without an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner. They had a sour, quiet meal by themselves, clustered down at one end of the long dining room table. The children were not good sports about it, and they quarreled about who would do the dishes on a holiday. Claire spilled root beer on the sofa, which Rhoda had recently had recovered in a heavy, lichen-green damask, which, it turned out, spotted easily.
They were not enjoyable children in general. Claire, at seven, was still too volatile—apt to burst into long hyena giggles, and so skittish that when it rained she ran for blocks because worms on the sidewalk scared her. Often she stared blankly into space with a vague, wincing look. Suzanne, still a callous bully toward her sister, had occasional moments of mature conduct. She was eleven, a pale, too-tall girl with pink-framed glasses. Rhoda had coached her sketchily on the facts of life; Suzanne asked no questions and claimed that she’d learned about it already from the other kids at camp. She was indifferent to boys, hair-dos, lipstick, and the romantic intrigues plotted by some of her alarmingly precocious classmates. Her main interest this year was insects. She was full of facts about their brief, merciless lives: the efficient composite eyes of houseflies, the cruel mating habits of bees, the vicious internecine battles of wasps. Rhoda would not permit her to keep an anthill in a jar in their room, although twice she caught her trying to hide one under the bed.
The bad Thanksgiving proved to be an apt beginning for a bleak and unpromising new year. All that winter Rhoda did not feel much like going out. The weather was especially bitter and nasty, with hostile, icy winds. When she carried groceries from the car, her thin shoes minced through the crusty snow on the lawn. In the evenings she ventured out to play bridge with Annie or Hinda, or she let couples take her to the movies, but at dinner parties she had no patience for meeting new people; she had ceased, for the time being, to make an effort.
Her brief season of awful dates was long since over. Word had gotten out among her friends of certain sarcastic remarks she had made about the men they had generously supplied for her; they were as insulted as hostesses whose cooking has been impugned. Nothing, they said, or as much as said, is good enough for you.
It seemed to Rhoda that she was only resting, that chances she had passed up would re-emerge in more compelling form: there was plenty of time—it went slowly enough. Only the rapid growth of the children made her feel the passage of months, and she was sometimes alarmed by a certain spinsterish cold-comfort tingeing her habits.
In February she drove back to the house one late afternoon at twilight and saw a strange car parked outside. In the kitchen she found Maisie and Dr. Snyder, the internist with the black glasses who had tended her mother, standing over her father at the kitchen table. Her father had a nasty gash on his forehead. He looked as though he’d been in a fight (not possible, was it?). When he saw Rhoda, he rolled his head and raised his pale fish-eyes to her. “I made a mistake,” he was saying. “I
got confused.”
“Oh, Mrs. Taber,” Maisie said. “He fell on the stairs.” It seemed that he had awakened from his nap in his room upstairs and had tried to make his way through the hallway to the bathroom, but the house had grown dark during his nap, and he had turned too soon, and fallen down the stairwell to the landing, where Maisie, hearing faint moans, had found him lying half-conscious in a pool of urine.
“Where were you going, hey, Jack?” the doctor said. Her father looked away from him.
After he had dressed the wound, the doctor called Rhoda aside and explained that it was not serious, but that a man his age could not be trusted near an open staircase. “Better make up a bed for him on the first floor from now on.”
The next day Rhoda’s brothers were there to express alarm, soothe the old man by teasing him, and offer solutions. Rhoda had a great desire to be rid of him for once, but he was so piteous and humble, with the white criss-crossed patch on his veinous forehead, like a bum or a patient in a battle ward. In the end her brother Andy suggested that Rhoda’s screened-in back porch, which they never used anyway, could be walled up and made into a real room, insulated and made attractive with pine paneling.
“You can’t change him, so change the house,” Frank said.
Rhoda had a distinct memory of a bird’s-eye view of the house; she was thinking of the blueprints, which she hadn’t looked at since she and Leonard had bought the place—they had been quite confusing then, but she had looked at them with such excitement it seemed as if a stain of them must still lie pressed under layers in her mind—the twilight-blue with its ruled white lines showing the boundaries of the yard and where the rooms were. The house-plans were still in the attic; she could go get them. “It’s not as if you’re expanding,” Andy said. “You don’t need them. Believe me. Where are you running to?” She would only be closing in the drafty northwest corner, mounting a protective bubble around the erratic movements of her father, within the same space the house already took up.