Household Words

by Joan Silber

  “It’s a king snake,” Suzanne wailed. “It’s harmless. It wouldn’t hurt anybody. It’s better than you are. A lot better.”

  “That’s enough,” Rhoda said. “I’m going to call the pet shop and have the man come and take it away. When you come home it will be gone—do you understand? Do you think it likes being locked up in that closet? How long have you had it? Answer me.”

  “None of your business,” Suzanne said. “Two weeks.”

  “Oh, Lord. What did you feed it? No, don’t tell me.”

  “He’s perfectly tame. They’re not slimy or anything. I was taking perfectly good care of him. I had him so he liked to come rest in my lap.”

  “That’s enough. You knew you couldn’t keep it, Suzanne, you knew and yet you defiantly went out and bought it. Why did you do that? Answer me.”

  “You’re a stupid, ignorant bitch,” Suzanne said. “You’ll be sorry. Good and sorry.”

  Thirteen years old and she talks this way to me, Rhoda thought. What’s next? What’s next? Rhoda found the number for Green Pastures Pets and Exotic Animals: Mr. Werner was out to lunch, back in an hour. “I hope you closed that closet door so it stays shut tight,” Rhoda said to Maisie. It had suddenly occurred to her that they were alone in the house with a snake until someone could be persuaded to remove it. She was not unduly afraid of reptiles, but she had a normal disgust; you couldn’t control them by yelling at them as you could with a dog. Of course if it was that thick it couldn’t slide under doors; the real horror of snakes was their motion, the muscular swaying and menacing ripple forward. How staunch Maisie was; she looked ashen but she continued with the vacuuming, humming to herself. “Some boy who helps in the store couldn’t come get it, could he?” Maisie called out over the sound of the motor.

  “We need someone who really knows what he’s doing,” Rhoda called back. “Otherwise we’re liable to have a mess on our hands.” She always said mess in that sibilant way when she was referring to the disasters of the earth (the Korean War had been a mess to her, for instance); it was better to approach these things with jeering nicknames—enlisted men in the army had the same theory—than to confront their melodrama head-on.

  To make matters worse, Claire arrived home from school before Mr. Werner arrived (he was late; he had promised two-thirty)—Claire, who could not stand the sight of worms or caterpillars or anything crawling, who had set up a crying wail when Mr. Dinger the plumber said he was going to send a snake down the drain, because she had thought he meant a real snake. Rhoda had been planning to make everyone agree not to tell Claire.

  She coached Claire in her low, calm, teaching voice, appealing to her maturity, just as Werner’s truck was pulling into the driveway. “Now we’re going to stand outside in front of the house,” Rhoda said, “and you don’t have to look or see anything.” Claire was absolutely silent; really, she was a good child; she posted herself on the flagstone walk while Rhoda told the man—a crag-toothed old coot he was, but he had been nice on the phone—the location of the closet. Mr. Werner went in carrying a rope looped into a noose at one end and a gray sack like a laundry bag; he emerged in about ten minutes with the bag draped over his shoulder; beneath its folds something stirred slightly. “It’s probably more scared than we are,” Rhoda said.

  “Mother,” Claire whined, “don’t say anything.”

  “Listen, don’t have any nightmares,” Rhoda said. “Do me a favor, okay?”

  Whether Claire had nightmares or not, Rhoda never knew (she didn’t complain and there was no need to ask), but Rhoda herself suffered from bad dreams. She dreamed that in her living room a large serpent nestled on the carpet before the mantel; it was brown like a leaf and it lay motionless in a coil. “Well, it’s not bothering anyone,” she thought in the dream and began to move toward it cautiously, but suddenly she saw that beneath the thick coils swarms of tiny wriggling infant snakes were issuing forth. They glowed with a white, crusted heat, and their numbers increased, moving forward in a pale, quivering mass like the grooves of a brain. As they poured into the room they began to burn or eat through the furnishings, cutting dark holes in the carpet; they made their way up the curtains, shredding the satin and filling the room with their peculiar scabrous glow, like the phosphorous given off by decaying objects. Rhoda began to run from the room but she was seized with outrage when she saw the creatures start to mount and consume the velvet covering of a chair that had belonged to her mother. She wanted to save her household and she began to shout for Maisie.

  When she woke, she was angry with Suzanne for having brought into the house the thing that caused this natural horror; then she felt ashamed for the fantastical extremes of her dream, and faintly amused that in her sleep she had been so worried about her furniture.

  For six weeks Suzanne was denied her allowance as punishment, and the money the pet store man had refunded was held for her in a special envelope which might or might not be returned to her, Rhoda said, depending on her behavior. Suzanne was no more tractable or sweet-tempered during that time—if anything, she was worse—but after a month and a half Rhoda decided to bury the hatchet (really, it might be best not to make too much of these things), and she used the money to buy Suzanne a gift, an orange mohair sweater with a cowl collar; the sweater was on sale and orange had been her favorite color as a child.

  “Only jerks wear that style,” Suzanne said. “I’m allergic to wool. You know I’m allergic to wool.”

  “Whatever I do for you, it’s wrong,” Rhoda said.

  “That’s right,” Suzanne said.

  “I’ll take it,” Claire said. “I like my sweaters real big.”

  “It’s not for you,” Rhoda said. “Suzanne’ll wear it. You’re not allergic, that’s a lot of crap. It’s about time you stopped walking around like a ragpicker. I’m going to throw out that snotty corduroy jacket of yours; I’m sick of looking at it. You know you walk like a hunchback, a pathetic old goon who chews her nails? Very nourishing, fingernails are. You know what that looks like? This is what it looks like, Suzanne.” Rhoda shuffled forward with her fingers thrust into her mouth up to the knuckle, and let her mouth drop like a mongoloid’s. Claire laughed and laughed.

  In December Rhoda gave her name to the Superintendent of Schools to be put on the list of teachers available to work per diem as substitutes. Within three days she received a call in the morning to report to a grammar school several towns away. When she saw the roomful of fourth graders milling about, she had a great desire to either bolt from the room or throw a blanket over all of them to still the motion and the noise, but when she wrote her name on the blackboard they took their seats and sat squinting up at her attentively, like little mice. They were a well-trained lot, eager to show her where books and materials were kept; they read aloud from their assignments in sweet, straining voices, so that at the end of the day Rhoda felt less weary than when she started and she had a new, disembodied sense of refreshment.

  Within weeks Rhoda was in great demand; she could work every day if she wanted to. Principals were full of praise for her maturity, her experience. Once she had a group for ten days while their teacher went to Kentucky for his mother’s funeral; at the end of the time the class made farewell cards for her with crayoned drawings of figures waving goodbye.

  In the mornings her own children fought over the phone when it rang, shrieking and wrenching the receiver from each other’s grip, barking into the mouthpiece and then handing it to their mother, annoyed that it was for her. The school secretaries were too polite and formal to comment, but Rhoda knew what they must think: in her own home she had no respect. Her children seemed to see through everything she did and attribute to it an ugliness of motive. She who was so effective with other people’s children faced, every evening, two countenances ready with disbelief. They acted as if they knew something no one else knew.

  In the evenings there were often dreadful fights about TV programs. Suzanne saw no need to let Claire take a turn at choosing; the
older girl was like the terrible swift sword of self-appointed justice; she lifted her hand ready to strike and Claire, whimpering, yielded. The real trouble came when Suzanne left the room during commercials and Claire switched the channel.

  But on Valentine’s Day, all three of them peaceably watched together a ninety-minute special of singing and dancing about Romance in these United States. When the chorus line, giving a history of American dances, got through with the Castle Walk and started the Charleston, Rhoda got up and began doing the Charleston, kicking her heels and singing, “Made in Carolina, some dance, some prance.” Claire was laughing—opening her mouth and letting her pointy face crinkle; she could show pure joy at times and the sight of Rhoda breaking into any physical hoopla always struck her as hilarious. Rhoda slapped her hips, turning in place, and pantomimed licking her palms—she was working very hard at entertaining them, and enjoying herself. She began doing the Bee’s Knees, crossing her wrists back and forth in front of her knees so that her legs seemed to slide through each other. Claire kept laughing, while Suzanne tried to figure out how it was done. The only emotion she ever seemed to extend to her mother was a kind of grim admiration. She acted as though knowing how to do the Bee’s Knees (which was simple and which everyone had learned when Rhoda was in school) was as impressive and technically difficult as faire des pointes. With a grave expression she watched Rhoda demonstrate the moves. Then Suzanne tried herself—she could do it slow but not fast—breaking into a smirk in the unaccustomed foolery of performance.

  “Very good,” Rhoda called out, loud over her own gasping. They were strangers to each other in this mode, which increased their elation and made it wilder but also short-lived. When the music stopped they went back to their chairs like recalled puppets.

  It reminded Rhoda of things she used to do with them when they were little. She hadn’t been one of those mothers who got down on the floor and rolled and played with her toddlers, but she had sung to them (made-up lullabies, and later, jingles about animals), and at birthday parties she had led them in “Farmer in the Dell.” She had expected them to be rather jolly children; as infants they had shown the usual liveliness, grabbing at dangling objects and crowing when bounced on knees. Insofar as she’d thought about it, she’d foreseen them as outdoorsy and rollicking (and in fact considered herself unusually tolerant of high energies in children). The backyard, where she could hear them, had seemed such a convenient arena for their anticipated bursts of simple animal spirits; she was always trying to get them to play in the backyard; she’d assumed they would be more aggressive and athletic. Bright healthy units of pure life they had seemed—her notion of “life” had been rather primitive, hadn’t it?—as though health only grew in one direction. The backyard was now the province of the dog, the wash, and a shrubby garden.

  In the late spring Harriet Tuckler went back to Shadyside for a weekend. She asked Rhoda to join her but Rhoda said she didn’t have the strength for it; that place was exhausting with all its healthy activities. Harriet came back with the news that the lake had been washed out in last year’s floods and had been re-dug and newly landscaped and was quite attractive now, and that Moe Seidman had gotten married. So soon, Rhoda thought, but he was capable of acting quickly and decisively when not obstructed by a strong, recalcitrant personality like herself, and probably some woman had considered him a very good catch. He had been looking to get married all along, she saw that now; that explained why he had talked himself into falling for her so hard and so prematurely in their relationship, and why he had put up with her hesitations in hopes of holding out for the final gain. He had married a coarse sort of person, according to Harriet, a divorcée with a bad reputation. She would most likely suit him better as a mate than Rhoda would have; it was odd that he had not known that himself a year ago. A wife is an abstract idea to some men, especially men who have lived to the age of forty-two without having had one. It seemed to Rhoda that at some time before meeting her, Moe must have made up his mind to get married, and in the course of things she had been a preparation, a thoroughfare en route to that goal. The word was in her mind because the sixth graders in one school sang, O beautiful for pilgrim feet / Whose stern impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat / Across the wilderness.

  It was the second or third verse to “America the Beautiful.” Her mind was full of lines from poems she’d learned years ago, advertising slogans, snatches of lyrics from songs that had never even been catchy; they rose to the surface at odd moments as though seeking some use and sank back in defeat. They bubbled out in her speech and the children shrugged at them. Only she herself always got some sort of kick out of saying them. They didn’t need to have meaning, only the authority of long and vivid usage triggered into remembrance by some literal association. “Loose lips sink ships, isn’t that right, Suzanne?” she would say playfully. “Mairzy doats and doazy doats and liddle lamzey divey—eh, Clairsie?” Neither Suzanne nor Claire was amused. Moe had been amused, and Leonard had been amused; both of them had been ready with either chuckling acknowledgments or snappy comebacks. Perhaps there was a kind of jocular mimicry only members of a couple enjoyed, satirizing the life of their times and humoring each other’s raucous traits. She was lonely for Moe’s appreciations; nowadays her life at home was very poor in enthusiastic responses. She was suddenly very sorry she had had to lose his company so totally. She hoped he would be fortunate in his marriage, she told Harriet.

  In June, Rhoda’s father underwent surgery to remove a blood clot in his leg. The operation, a fairly simple one, was successful, but because of his age he did not heal quickly and the doctor suggested that unless Rhoda planned to nurse him full-time he might be better off in a convalescent home. Andy found a highly rated, astonishingly expensive place on the grounds of an old estate in hilly country. (Rhoda and her two brothers had agreed to share the fees.) “It looks,” Andy said, “like an Ivy League college. You’re going to like it, Pop. I only worry that the nurses are too good-looking—might get you too excited at your age. What do you say to that, huh?”

  Rhoda’s father was not saying anything to anything. He had already said that he didn’t want to go, and he had been told that he did. “Make a list,” Rhoda told him a few days before he was scheduled to leave. “Write down everything you want me to pack for you.” “Diapers,” he said. “Ha, ha,” Rhoda said. “No, really.” “Whatever fits in a suitcase,” he said.

  On weekends Rhoda, Frank, Andy, and the wives alternated their visits; the children were all off at camp. It was a long drive, into the rural part of the state. The place was impressive, with croquet grounds and a dining hall painted pale green with white molding, like a Wedgwood plate. In an effort to get their father to form social relationships while he was there, they took to conversing with the other residents, who were often lively, intelligent people—dapper gentlemen who read up on current events, hearty, flirtatious old ladies. It was considerably more gratifying to chat with the other patients, since their father was often silent and uncommunicative, but when on the next visit they asked where that nice Mrs. Appleby or Mr. Crewes was this week, their father never knew. They had not died: that was one thing. People were not allowed to die at the Sarah Stinson Finn Home; terminally ill patients were not admitted, or were sent elsewhere.

  When the children returned from camp in August, Rhoda insisted that they come with her to the home. Suzanne, surprisingly, did not balk and in fact explained to Claire that she had to go with them even if she had already told Janey Littauer that they were going to the movies together. Suzanne might have a sour disposition but she was highly principled in the way Leonard had been. She was always catching Rhoda in slight discrepancies, howling over her most innocent white lies as examples of hideous hypocrisy. “You can’t get away with anything with her,” Rhoda told friends, with some admiration. Moe had once said, “It’s the function of teenagers and muck-raking journalists to point out the inconsistencies of the world.”

  At the ho
me Rhoda’s father let pass onto his face a slow, shaky smile when he saw Claire, who was his favorite, and he reached up to her with trembling arms. “I had the lead in Alice in Wonder-land at camp,” she said. “Did you know that, Grandpa? I was Alice.” Suzanne let herself be hugged and then disappeared; she was seen later examining the hydrangeas and the rows of red salvia before the administration building.

  Rhoda sat with her father on the terrace. Mr. Dotson came by—a dog-faced, garrulous old man who was about to be transferred because his melanoma was worsening. He drew up a chair next to them. “See you’ve got another pretty girl come to visit, Jack.” He winked at Rhoda’s father, patting Claire. “Lots of kids here today. I just had a long chat with a young lady who says she might want to be a doctor some day. What a wonderful bedside manner she’ll have, very affable and pleasant. Yes, you’ve got that part down, I told her. Got the personality for it. She looks very smart—she wears those harlequin glasses you see girls wearing now. She says she wants to be a doctor or a marine biologist. You’ve got the bedside manner, I told her.”

  With a shock Rhoda realized that he was talking about Suzanne. Suzanne did not want to be a doctor—he had that wrong—she wanted to be a medical researcher (or, as he said, a marine biologist). Rhoda would hardly have recognized her from the description—affable indeed—but she’d had indications that the children (and Suzanne in particular) presented different characters to the rest of the world. Suzanne was nice to small children—she let cousins come into her room to look at her microscope; they sat rigidly still with the fear of breaking anything, but they stayed, seemingly rapt, for hours while she explained the different slides to them.

  It was Rhoda who had to endure from her the raw, unseemly eruptions, the lapses into primitive behavior. Home life brought out the worst in all of them; once she had smacked Suzanne so hard she’d sent her glasses flying across the room. It had frightened Rhoda herself at the time, and she had felt, in the midst of her rage, the most profound embarrassment. Whatever she’d been saying at the time had been puerile, unintelligent, and foolish. It occurred to her that anger made fools of people the way love was supposed to. She had gathered the spectacles from the sofa and handed them to Suzanne; they had landed safely on the green brocade sofa and sunk into a crevice between the cushions. They were thick, loose cushions; the heavy elegance of the sofa, with its ball-and-claw feet, was painful to her at that moment—genteel scenery for scenes of mess and turmoil, stagey eighteenth-century lines of order where there was no order.