Household Words

by Joan Silber

  The bus was coming—he reached for her and after they kissed he held her in a long treasuring hug which was much more suave and tender than his passing speeches. On the dark ride home, she was painfully lonesome for Leonard, with his natural stateliness and his sense of occasion. It made her slightly hysterical to think in this way. She could go neither backward nor forward. She couldn’t think of any man she knew, including her friends’ husbands, whom she really liked better than Moe.

  Once she caught herself telling Suzanne, “Wait till Mr. Seidman gets here. He’ll fix the rung on that chair,” and she knew that she was getting used to expecting him. Suzanne said, “I think we should just throw the chair out,” but Rhoda took this—not as a slur against Moe or his abilities—but as another sign of Suzanne’s attitude lately. She had fallen into an early-adolescent scorn for the décor, the neighborhood, Rhoda’s cooking. But she had too much of a sense of privacy to be rude when Moe was around, which was another reason to welcome his visits. In December, with the weather nasty again, Rhoda suggested over the phone that he spend the whole weekend this next time. “There’s a sofa downstairs big enough for your big feet,” she said.

  She had no fixed idea of what she meant him to think. She knew perfectly well what possibilities the arrangement suggested. After all she was “a grown woman” (as she sometimes described herself to Maisie)—direct in her judgments and not squeamish about sex; still, she was, in her own mental conversations with herself, discreet about her own desires. She was not capable of celebrating raw sexual feeling. Moe had, at certain times, evoked sensations long since gone to sleep in her—she was glad to know them again, but when the stirrings rose, they always came up against the limit of her feelings for him and settled back down again. The whole process made her restless and jumpy and desperate. She would have liked to have been hypnotized—sent into a swoon—by the intensity of his affection. She did trust his feeling for her. How could he not be devoted to her, when she was so much more than he was?

  He arrived bearing a little leather overnight case like a doctor’s bag, and a gift for her, a book of cartoons he thought would amuse her. Fractured French it was called—“Femme de ménage” pictured a fortyish woman with deep cleavage and the definition, “a woman of my age,” and so on. “Clever,” she said. She was far too weak to dislike anything.

  It snowed in the afternoon—which was very pretty and romantic, seen from the windows in the living room—but which kept them indoors. Claire talked them into making fudge with her, but she grew bored when it took too long to reach the soft-ball stage and she ran outside to build a snowman and left them to finish. They stood at the stove, taking turns stirring, sweating slightly over the sugary vapors. They brushed past each other, changing places, and Moe put his arm around her aproned waist. Rhoda felt sticky and drowsy. “What work!” Moe said. He took off his sweater in the heat, lifting it over his arms; there were deep, wet stains on his shirt. He pushed his shirt into his pants quickly, like a child tucking himself up before anyone yelled at him for his loose shirt-tails.

  He apologized so profusely for letting the candy burn at the bottom of the saucepan that she began to think he was slightly afraid of her. All day he was full of foolishly fond, melting looks. “I love the way your mind works,” he told her when they were discussing Eisenhower’s foreign policy, while they played honeymoon bridge. And at dinner he said, oddly, “You have copper-colored eyes.” They were simple brown. She had nothing to say back. She murmured at him coyly. At the end of the night she gave him a pile of sheets and an extra pillow and went up to bed by herself.

  But lying in her twin bed with the light off, she was surrounded on all sides by the fresh image of the humility of his passion, until the poignance of it pressed on her and drew out her own hungers. In the middle of the night she went to him. It was quite dark in the living room. “Is that you?” he said. They tumbled about, hearing each other breathing hoarse, impersonal gasps. She had expected to think of Leonard, so that when the direct physical memory came upon her, it was not so awful, and pain commingled with arousal: she was heartsick in a way that made her helpless and deeply moved. But across the heated exchange of sensation, as his hands reached to ready her, she had a sudden vision of what sex really was—the blunt crudity of its positioned grappling, the spreading intimacy of its secretions and exposures—so that it became unthinkable with this man, and in the end she stopped him just short of the act itself. They lay perfectly quiet, still bent and folded around each other in a form which was somewhat silly now because it had no purpose. “It’s all right,” he said. She felt like a crazy woman.

  Her first thought—when she woke from a shallow sleep—was that she had to get rid of him as evidence of the terrible muddle she had made of everything. She began to slip away from him to return to her own bed, but when she stirred he reached out in his sleep and drew her to him with such resolute need that she was moved once again to melting confusion. She experienced an overwhelming temptation not to think about anything.

  It persisted to the next day, and made her sleepy; she had difficulty following conversation, but Moe, who stuck to her side like a puppy, was full of amiable recitation and easily satisfied by smiles and nods. They were sitting having lunch in the dinette—the girls were outside—when she heard him say, “I don’t ever want you to have the idea that I would push you into anything,” and she thought, oh, no, he’s going to talk about it. But he was saying that he supposed she knew he wanted to marry her and what did she think about all that? She thought he must know better, from his business, than to begin a request by apologizing (he had dropped all the devices from his own world in coming to her, so that he approached her unarmed, awkward as a civilian). He had taken her hand, in courtly fashion, and in her embarrassment she looked down at the fingers covering hers—his nails, with their sanded elegance, so different from the hard rawness of the rest of his body, with its forest of hair and the pale shiny scar on his thigh. He seemed so painfully well-intentioned. She wondered if he was reassuring her because he thought she’d had eleventh-hour hesitations about her honor, whereas in fact she cared less and less about these things as she grew older. She gave him the answer he had provided her with. “It’s too soon to tell,” she said. It was the exact opposite of the truth.

  He was the most compliant person. In the matter of sex their relationship was to stay at the same stopping-point for the indefinite future. Moe never complained; they developed a slow way of lying together, sweetly comradely, as though a shared fatigue kept them from the edge. The muddle of their truncated contact became completely normal. At times they were even playful with each other, romping.

  It did seem to surprise him to find himself in this situation, a grown man. He would get up and hop about, kicking down the cuffs of his trousers, and moaning, “It only hurts when I walk, for instance. Who needs to walk?” He clutched himself in mockery of his own discomfort. It became a sort of family joke between them.

  She actually liked him best when he was not around. She felt attached to him by reason of their nebulous but nonetheless factual physical intimacy. She allowed herself to think that she was used to his faults—everyone had faults, didn’t they?—his jokestering, his bad taste, his lack of serious purpose. He was just Moe (Moe-your-beau: one of his lines); and in the guise of fond acceptance she enjoyed, with the perfect languor of an auto-induced delight, the preening of her own generosity.

  Just before Christmas they arranged to meet in the city so that they could walk up Fifth Avenue and see all the displays in stores, go window-shopping. At Lord & Taylor there was a wonderful diorama of little mechanical elves busy at their workshop. At Saks there were cool garlands of icicles and blue lights, piles of sweaters in luxurious, nonchalant heaps, and a scene of elegant girl-mannequins standing around a Christmas tree in their jaunty, vacant poses, arms stiff, wearing the most amazing loungewear.

  “Look at that one,” Rhoda pointed. It was a dressing gown with an outer layer made e
ntirely of lace, tiers of white over white chiffon. “Now that’s a gorgeous item. It must cost a fortune.”

  “It’s Alençon lace,” he said. “You’d look pretty splendid in it. Quite the lady. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had one in your size. What are you—a ten?” He took her by the hand; he was about to lead her into the store—he wanted to buy it for her; Rhoda could not believe it. She drew back, dismayed. She had never worn a thing like that in her life.

  “Where would I go in it?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. Even if you only wore it around the house. Even if you just looked at it in the closet.”

  “What’s the point?”

  They walked on without speaking. “Are you sure?” he said. She nodded. He was always wanting to spend money on her, bringing her gifts. There was something infantilizing about having to clap your hands over a boxed set of earrings, and his own puppyish pleasure in pleasing her was not an uplifting sight. But the dreamy beauty of the gown had gotten to her—it was a perfect thing—and he meant well, even in his vulgar and irritating way of always flashing his ready cash, and she took his hand as they walked, attached to him with the faint stirring of regret.

  That evening they went to a Turkish night club and watched a belly dancer. She was a young, broad-featured woman who ended her act by leaning into a full backbend, her upraised stomach still rippling; men slipped dollar bills under her costume or stuck them to her sweating flesh. Rhoda, smiling, clapped in time.

  Moe saw her to the station (she was taking the train home this time) and kissed her before she boarded, like a war bride going home. In her sense of people watching them she forgot to kiss back; she was feeling both besmirched and flattered.

  The night was bitterly cold, and her coat was inadequate. She hugged herself in her seat like a waif. It was too dark to see much out of the windows, she might be going anywhere; there was only one person at the other end of the car, an old man wearing earmuffs, falling asleep against his seat. She was overcome by the melancholy and the sense of being unlucky which overtakes travelers alone at night. But she’d had a good time, hadn’t she? Their times together were like candy, cheaply sweet and insubstantial. She was less than she might be. She thought again of Leonard, a more serious person. Lord Graveairs, she had called him once, after a character in a play. “Laugh,” he would say, “everything is a joke to you.” The train passed noisily out of one station; she saw the street lights reflected in the windows and then she saw herself, with her makeup paled and her lips dry, and she felt shallow and lost and not suited for better things.

  Moe’s overnight visits were apparently exciting some interest among the neighbors, but since they’d spread rumors long before he’d ever spent the night and Rhoda had been righteously miffed then, she declined to get nervous now. Her father had spoken to Moe only once; since then he had retired to his room out of shyness. He who was normally so seedy-minded never questioned his daughter’s virtue; occasionally he teased her about her suitor. The children said nothing. Claire was glad of the company; Suzanne slept late and kept to her room till noon; still she had a tendency to know things. My kids, Rhoda thought, don’t ask questions.

  Moe still slept on the couch when he stayed at the house. Rhoda, who was a light sleeper, could hear him in the night, padding back and forth to the bathroom. Once, on a windy night in February, she woke suddenly, hearing something at the front door. A train went by, clattering on its track a quarter of a mile away, and then she heard from downstairs a long, low moan, like a ghost in gothic tales. She thought she heard it again, a moaning.

  She went down to the living room to find Moe crawling on his belly in the foyer, hitting his shoulder against the front door and rattling it. When she leaned over him, he clutched her with such sudden muscular force his fingers dug viciously into her ribs. She called to him to wake him, and he stared at her stonily until his eyes cleared and his grip loosened. “What was it?” she whispered. She was badly shaken, trying to remember how to calm someone safely. He shook his head. “Sometimes the war repeats on me like onions,” he said.

  G.I. humor. He crawled on his belly through enemy fire, she remembered. Apparently it was the sound of the train that had set him off. He sat on the sofa with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “I’m fine,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Rhoda said, “I wonder if they just changed the train schedule.” In fact she was fairly sure the train went by at the same time every night. It was one of those usual noises in the suburbs, like radiator pipes or rain on the roof; sometimes it woke her. There was no place they could put him where he wouldn’t hear it. She’d often seen the scar on his leg, a pale pink crater with a whitish line trailing off from it like a worm. She had not much cared, except from curiosity, but now he seemed abnormally disfigured, and she resented his taking her with him into disturbance. I need this like a hole in the head, she was thinking.

  But the next day he was charming with the children, the night was gone, and it seemed overhasty and unnecessary to act on the basis of freak accidents, things done in sleep.

  She was relieved when he asked her to meet him in town the next weekend, at his office in rooms above the factory. Following his directions, she went to an address in Manhattan’s grimy warehouse district at the close of the day, riding up in a rickety freight elevator manned by a leering young fellow chewing gum. The second floor was one huge room with a high tinned ceiling and walls showing heating pipes. People worked at makeshift cubicles partitioned by filing cabinets. At one end a row of women sat typing; behind them was a door with a sign saying THE BOSS; beneath it another sign said, NOBODY, BUT NOBODY, KNOWS DE TROUBLE I SEEN.

  Rhoda gave her name to one of the secretaries. “What?” The girl grimaced. It was hard to speak politely amid the typing and the rhythmic chug of the machines from below. “Taber,” Rhoda said.

  “Oh, go on in. He’s on the phone but it’s okay.”

  He had his back to her when she entered, and he stood gripping the phone receiver and crouching forward as though he were about to pounce at the wall. He was yelling into the phone. “Forget Farber. Farber can go shove it up his ass as far as I’m concerned. You don’t keep your word, you don’t get your orders.” He turned as he heard her—his face was wrenched and hard; when he saw her he put his arm up with the palm raised: the sign to wait. “What are you saying to me? You will not. Not to me you won’t. Farber is a cheap scumbag. He thinks he’s so smart, next time he walks in here I’m going to break his arm and beat him over the head with the bloody stump.” His voice wavered into a high, hysterical note—“I don’t need him and I don’t need you”—and he slammed down the phone.

  He kicked the desk. “Punks. I deal with punks.” Rhoda stared at him: he was out of control. Suddenly he reached forward and touched her hand. “Sorry about that. Bad day here.”

  “So I see,” Rhoda said, smiling tightly and raising her eyebrows.

  “Sorry,” he said again, shrugging. He began pulling papers out of a pile of invoices on his desk; he really was not the least bit sorry.

  “It’s all right.” She was still bristling with horror at the violence of the language. She was also a bit frightened, afraid to say anything to him. Her instinct was to stay put and keep quiet, as though she had walked into a bad neighborhood with no protection. What if she’d had children with her? He actually thought it was all right to be like that. Probably it was normal in his world.

  A low, pig-like way to behave. She could not stop thinking about it long enough to make conversation with him. He looked up from his desk. “Ready to go?”

  “Whenever you are,” she said.

  He put on his jacket and they left the office, walking east across town to a small Italian restaurant he knew. It was an unseasonably warm night—the crest of a brief mid-winter thaw—and the air was softly breezy with a foretaste of spring. She was reminded of the summer before when they had met; so it had been—what?—seven months.

  T
hey ordered veal and pasta for dinner and the waiter was very jolly because they both knew a few words in Italian. Moe’s accent was surprisingly passable. She did not, at that moment, dislike him; she had already reached the stage of forgiveness, pressed by the knowledge that it was over between them. She couldn’t see what there had ever been; she looked back, as through a tunnel, and saw nothing. She felt inestimably cheapened by the fact that she had permitted herself to hope.

  “You liked that little restaurant on Prince Street, didn’t you?” he asked her the next time.

  “Oh, I had a really terrific time,” she said. She felt comfortable lying to him now because she was decently sure he didn’t merit the effort it would have taken to tell the truth. He, on the other hand, grew edgier, always touching her hair and telling her how happy she made him, disturbing her in private with tight, tooth-scraping kisses. She would toss her head and laugh. In conversations she took to rubbing his hand reassuringly.

  By spring she still saw Moe occasionally but he no longer came for more than a day’s visit. She developed new interests. In April, when the tulips came up in the front yard, she noticed they’d gotten smaller and smaller every year since Leonard had died, because she neglected to dig up the bulbs and store them over the winter. She began to work in the garden herself, putting in roses and begonias around the back, and hosing down the peony bushes to rid them of ants. When she dug in the earth she wore an old, ratty, red flannel shirt of Leonard’s, which hung loose and eccentric-looking over her dress and amused the children enormously. She wiped the sweat off her face so that the soil from her hands smeared her upper lip like a mustache, and she did not care. Not caring had a calming, luxurious effect.