Household Words

by Joan Silber

  On Moe’s last visit he brought with him a wooden pull-toy for Claire that was much too young for her. She thanked him with such mature resignation that Rhoda mused about what sort of man he was, so weak even children knew they had to lie to him.

  They sat on chairs in the backyard to get some sun; a breeze came up late in the afternoon, and Rhoda drew her cardigan around her like a shawl. “I saw Annie Marantz the other day,” Rhoda said, “and she asked for you. She’s crazy about you.”

  “Too bad for me you’re not under her influence,” Moe said. “Tell her I’d marry her except she’s already married. I can’t marry you any more, can I?”

  She tried to explain tactfully about how she couldn’t, really, as though forces beyond her will kept her from wanting to. He stiffened and said, “Well, I hope I haven’t wasted your time,” and she shook her head emphatically, although that was exactly what she thought.

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. He was standing in her garden, a crook-necked, defeated man with a prominent Adam’s apple, wearing a sports shirt whose short sleeves his laundry had pressed too crisply, so they flapped at his arms like creased wings. “My heart,” Rhoda told Hinda later, “went out to him,” expressing, in that generous common phrase, her pity, her contempt.

  8

  IN JULY SHE left for Europe with Harriet Tuckler. On the French ship they lay in deck chairs and Rhoda grew tanned and handsome, congratulating herself at getting away from the children, away from the trailing attachment to Moe, who had persisted in calling her long after it was officially over between them, bothering her with late night calls, coaxing her into tense lunch-time meetings. It had been more than twenty years since she’d been to Europe with Ellie—it surprised her now that she hadn’t gone back before this. The time with Moe had left her feeling, by contrast with his commonness, refined and keen-minded, delicately tuned; she would have taken up needlepoint had that had any appeal for her—instead she was drawn back to the one sophistication she had, which was an acquaintance with the everyday culture of Europeans. She was so used to making reference to the way they did things in Europe that by now she expected to impress even the Continentals with her knowledge of their ways. And in fact on the French ship the stewards applauded her accent and her spirit; she explained menus to Harriet, told her French people never wore white shoes in the city in summer.

  In Le Havre a petit fonctionnaire misdirected their luggage and they had to wait for an hour at Customs in the wet chilly night until Harriet’s valise was found. But when they were taken finally to their small, quiet hotel, the room, with its iron bedsteads, its Empire-striped wallpaper, and the balcony doors overlooking the street, was poignantly recognizable. Nothing had changed: the furnishings were like clichés no one had the sense to retire, the trappings of a thousand modest hotel rooms. “This stuff must have been here since the year one,” Rhoda said happily.

  She remembered telling Leonard about a hotel room much like this in Paris, where she and Ellie had stayed. He had been so taken with her descriptions. The more comical she had been in recalling the ancient clawed feet on the bathtub off the hall and the dark splintery chiffonnier whose drawers had stuck, the more worldly and intellectually evocative they had seemed to him.

  Harriet went to sleep directly; Rhoda sat up in bed, alert with sudden contentment, listening to the occasional sounds of footsteps and male voices calling to each other in blurred French from the alley below; she was jolted into an excitement close to panic. She went to the window. They were only on the third floor but she had the feeling of expansion which sometimes overtook her on great heights, a desire—quite the opposite of a fear—to leap down and out into the space below. She could hardly stand the feeling of hope. Only the sense that it was attached to the pre-measured limits of her vacation made her calm enough to sleep.

  In Paris she found that she remembered the names of the streets, and the names of people came back to her at unexpected moments. Harriet repeated the information after her, with a delight that surprised Rhoda. The Parisians on the street had changed—colder, as everyone said—they had been through a war, after all, and they’d grown tighter, more money-constricted than ever. Of course, she was older, young men did not ogle her or try to paw her girdled rump as she went past. She had great gaps in her vocabulary; when she wanted breast of chicken in a restaurant, she had to pantomime with her hands the outline of a great bosom before her. The waiter laughed at her, imitated the gesture, and brought her the correct portion; she pointed and made the gesture again when he had put the dish down. Being a foreigner made you clownish by necessity. She felt free and gay, making bold childish motions with comic skill. The waiter told her she should go audition for Marcel Marceau. Harriet applauded; Rhoda took a small bow. It was exactly the sort of joking Suzanne and Claire found so annoying.

  She did not try to locate any of the people she’d once known there—for one thing, she was afraid to find out about them (many of them had been Jews). And Moe had once told her a story of an army buddy of his who’d gone back to Paris and found the hotel where he’d once had a rather sweet affair with the girl who brought coffee in the mornings. The fat, slack-jawed proprietor was still there, and when the American introduced himself, the old man began to weep. Moe’s friend had thought it was because the man was so glad to see him, but it turned out it was mostly from shock at how old the soldier had gotten. “Mais vous avez changé,” the hotelkeeper kept saying, and raising his hands as if he were under arrest.

  She wasn’t the sort of person, she told Harriet, to go dredging up the past, and in fact she didn’t seem like that sort of person now. They walked for hours in all sorts of neighborhoods, scoffing at the timidity of other Americans. In a restaurant a family with two young children—hearing her speak to the waiter in French—asked if she could find out if the milk was safe to drink. Rhoda tried to ask the waiter if the milk had been treated “dans le moyen de Pasteur.” “He says he never heard of Pasteur,” Rhoda said, “but everyone drinks the milk.” She thought it was an insulting question to ask in a civilized country.

  As Harriet said, they were rubes, these other tourists; Rhoda, whatever her failings, was not a rube. She had never enjoyed more fully the rich, slightly cynical heartiness of her own personality. At Les Halles they bought peaches from an old woman who tried to raise the price after she had taken their money. For ten minutes she and Rhoda remonstrated into each other’s faces, repeating the terms of the bargain. “Voleuse!” Rhoda began to shout in an ecstasy of vocabulary; she was practically spitting, in an imitation of Gallic nerve. She lost the argument, but back at the hotel she and Harriet thrilled themselves retelling the incident to each other. “Thief! Thief!” Harriet squealed. “You were something.”

  An old sense of herself as formidable came back to Rhoda. She hadn’t realized how far she’d come from that, how much Leonard’s death had broken her confidence.

  In Rome she got a postcard from Claire at camp. “—Last night we had a pajama party with Bunk 12 and we all traded beds. Bunk 11 slept in Bunk 12’s beds and vice versa—get it? I got a letter from Mr. Seidman with 2 DOLLARS in it!!! I bought a giant Hershey Bar with Almonds when our bunk hiked to town, but I am saving the rest. I didn’t know you could send money through the mail.”

  She spoke of her children often, but it occurred to her that she remembered them differently from the way they actually were. She had lost hold of the squirming intricacy of their characters, reduced them to something manageable in the mind. Her life at home seemed pale and languid to her now—the town and her own social milieu seemed stale and provincial. It depressed her even to think about eating the fruits and vegetables at home.

  In Rome Harriet was amazed when Rhoda knew how to ask for a double room in Italian. “You’ve pulled another language out of your hat,” she said. In truth Rhoda knew only a few Italian phrases, but she delivered them in a fluid accent and she could understand a lot through cognates, so that she almost believed she spoke Italian
; she regretted that she normally had so little chance to use it. She remembered that one of Chekhov’s Three Sisters had complained of what a waste it was to know three languages in a town like theirs.

  In Florence they went to the Uffizi, walked through the long crowded halls of the gallery, wearying their feet before paintings of simpering Virgins, sinewy Old Testament patriarchs shouting into lightning-filled skies, and limp St. Sebastians mutely bleeding from arrows piercing the flesh. To Rhoda’s amusement a young Italian in absurdly tight pants tried to pick her up; he blocked a huge panorama of a Biblical battle scene, turned round, and breathed into her ear, “You like this painting? Beauteeful or not beauteeful?” She was mildly insulted that he could imagine she might be interested in him; she and Harriet had just been saying that single and widowed people weren’t regarded as so unfortunate here. “Oh, go away, I’m too old for this nonsense,” Rhoda said, and walked away herself.

  The presence of beautiful objects was not uplifting to her; she found these things magnificent but macabre in their religiosity. She was impressed by the artist’s attention to detail—she would stand in front of one piece and satisfy herself noticing things—until through this she worked herself into sharing the swooning intensity of feeling. She was not moved by the viewing but she was filled in some way.

  In Vienna, Harriet (who had once studied the cello) indulged herself in five straight nights of concert-going. Rhoda (who could hum the better-known classical themes from the 78’s they’d had in her childhood, and who’d been musical enough in school to be given a part in Iolanthe where she’d sung “Tripping hither, tripping thither” in a fast, comic tempo) sat in a velvet-draped hall and listened to Mozart with growing interest. The light sweet rhythms, the circling repetitions, the full jubilant phrases, were warming and pleasurable. By the third concert her attention wavered; in her faint sleepiness she mused on the gilt garlands over the stage and she felt the pulse of the music rather than heard it—another sort of civilized pleasure.

  She returned home with wooden shoes and costume dolls for Claire; for Suzanne a cuckoo clock, a music box in the form of a chalet that raised its roof, and a book in German with exquisitely reproduced color photos of reptiles, Suzanne’s new enthusiasm. At the pier she could see them on the other side of Customs, bobbing at her; Claire was brown from the sun like a little rabbit, and Suzanne wore a sailor’s cap with the brim pulled down. Her brother Andy and his wife were with them; they waved and waved, drawing her back. When they saw her wave to them, they began to point and gesture like cops beckoning her into another traffic lane.

  She was wearing a green, tightly fitted suit she had bought in Rome; pinned to the lapel was a carnation that had been given to all the ladies at the ship’s farewell breakfast. She was so used to feeling faint vibrations under her feet on shipboard that the stillness on land was nauseating, like a stifling room. She kept taking the commands on Custom Bureau signs for words in French or German; had she read them aloud, she would have mispronounced them.

  Claire was leaping on her, and the others waited in turn to kiss her, ignoring Harriet, who stood apart. “The best trip ever,” Rhoda was saying. “Did you know I was all the way up on one of the highest mountains in Switzerland, Claire?” She gave Claire a croissant she had saved from breakfast. “It’s not sweet,” Claire said, biting into it and giving it back.

  “Wait till you see the things I bought,” Rhoda said, getting into the car. “See this wallet? That’s the fleur-de-lis, the national flower of France.” The children were not much interested; Suzanne said nothing, and all the ride home Claire chattered about color war at camp and a girl named Marcy. Andy kept turning toward her, letting his eyes drift from the road, to tell about some plumbing problems that had developed in her house over the summer. Already she missed Harriet, who had been met by her sister. Rhoda could see that her own rushed excitement—the traveler’s breathlessness—made her strange to them.

  Suzanne kept tapping at the front seat with her foot. “Try to stop that,” Rhoda said. The change in Suzanne was startling; in the rapid way of teenagers she’d grown suddenly older over the summer. She was acne-ridden, and she had lost all the soft sweetness of her face; it was now filled with unseemly expressions, crooked smirks, and sudden closures.

  “The house might still be something of a mess,” Andy said, as they turned into Rhoda’s block. “Maisie’s been cleaning up all morning.” Rhoda had hardly thought of the house all summer; she had gone from one hotel room to another and found it quite satisfying, looking forward to the variety and regional touches.

  The furniture in the living room, sheathed under plastic coverings once given to her by Moe, waited for her like ghostly infants to be changed and tended. Maisie, who was in the dining room, turned off the vacuum cleaner as they came in. “Everything was all so dirty,” she said, with great sadness. She was standing in front of the mahogany china cabinet with its burl inlays on the drawers, and she had hung, somewhat crookedly, the beige drapes made extra long to “break” over the carpet. “One of the teacups got broke when I was polishing the cabinet,” Maisie said. She obviously had to say this right away to get it over with.

  “Don’t worry about it now, Rhode,” Andy said. Rhoda opened the cabinet and found the teacup with its handle lying next to it. “It can be glued,” she said, glaring at Maisie. It was cream-colored glazed parian, plain except for a sculpted pattern, the most translucent and fragile of her china pieces; of course the crack would show. A pretty little cup: she felt a sting of shame at her own disloyalty—her foolhardiness—in thinking she ever could have lived without these things.

  In a flurry of settling in again, Rhoda was warned by her brother Andy that she might notice drastic changes in their father. “He’s showing signs of a marked decline,” Andy said. “He’s not clean about his person. He forgets to put his teeth in. He asks about cousins who died thirty years ago and he can’t remember what he did the day before. He has prostate trouble; he wets the bed sometimes.” Andy’s wife, who had tended him all summer, said, “He tries, he really tries.”

  By the end of a week Rhoda had decided that he did not try hard enough. He was nasty with the children, who fortunately went back to school after the first weekend. He could not eat a bowl of soup and keep his hands from shaking; he refused to wait for his food to cool and he burned himself constantly. At night he complained of the children’s shouting.

  He was right about that. It was horrible—they were like howling domestic harpies. It was mostly Suzanne’s fault now; she had grown cruder and more fixed in her bullying tactics; she had developed a set of malicious fingernails and a truly unattractive side to her personality.

  Suzanne had never been as pretty as Claire, but she had once been a robust child with a round jaw and fat knees. Now she was ill-dressed and unfortunate-looking; her blouse was always hanging out of her skirt, and she had odd whims for garish colors and clashed pairings. When she walked to school she clutched her books to her chest as though she were cold or afraid of thieves. She was in junior high now.

  Her teachers reported that although she was bright she failed to hand in assignments, except in science class. In her room were two large, glossy zoo posters—a hawksbill tortoise, with fatty, soft feet splayed out from beneath an impressive shell, and an alligator with its eyes bulging above the water line. Suzanne asked if she might keep a tank of tropical fish by the window; Rhoda first said yes, but then she had to rescind when she found out how expensive the equipment was. She offered goldfish instead but Suzanne snorted in contempt. “They’ve got a real piranha in the pet store, I saw it yesterday,” Suzanne said. “That’s lovely,” Rhoda said. “Yes,” Suzanne said, “I’m going to buy it and slip it into the bathtub some time when you’re in the water.”

  She grew mushrooms in the basement for her project in the Science Fair. They did well in the cool concrete room, surrounded by boxes of the girls’ discarded games; Rhoda’s only request was that Suzanne keep the dirt away fr
om the Ping-Pong table, which Maisie used for stacking the laundry. “Do they really grow from your watching them so much?” Rhoda asked. Every day after school Suzanne spent hours in the cellar. “It’s an obsession,” Rhoda said, and shuddered.

  Rhoda was eating her usual cottage cheese on lettuce for lunch when Maisie came up from the basement suddenly, clattering on the stairs, and slammed the door. She was usually quiet and orderly in her movements; Rhoda looked up from her magazine ready to comment about the noise. Maisie was leaning against the cellar door panting and she called out as though she were afraid to move. “Mrs. Taber,” she said, in that voice that was always so high and light for her squat frame, “there is a SNAKE down there.”

  “Ugh,” Rhoda said. “It must be a garter snake, that got in from the garden. Have you been leaving the side door open?”

  “Not a garden snake, I don’t think so,” Maisie said. “It’s in the closet under the stairs. I went to get some bleach out of there for the wash, I opened the door and I see this thing coiled up on one of the shelves. That thick around, it’s got light and dark markings on it. I shut that door and latched it. I saw it move—it’s alive.”

  Rhoda called the junior high school at once and got them to get Suzanne out of gym class. “All right,” she said, when Suzanne’s voice came over the phone. “What kind of snake is it?”

  “Did you kill it?” Suzanne shrieked. “If you killed it, I’ll kill you. It’s my snake, I paid for it, you had no right to go near it.”

  “No one has done anything,” Rhoda said. “What sort of person do you think I am? Do you think I go around killing things? You went and bought it at that pet shop, didn’t you?—I’m going to have a talk with that man. They have no business selling things like that to children.”