Household Words

by Joan Silber

  On the ride back from the convalescent home Rhoda felt a swelling ache in her gut just below her breastbone; at first she thought it was from aggravation—she had just gotten lost, as she generally did, by missing one poorly marked exit on the highway, and she was angry with the children for having distracted her at the crucial moment. They passed a settlement of factories, an industrial eyesore that smelled of burning oil, and the fumes made her nauseous; the nausea stayed with her all the way back to the house and through the evening. When she undressed for bed she saw that her midriff bulged slightly and hurt to the touch, just as it had in the years before her marriage when her gall bladder had given her trouble, except now she had no gall bladder.

  For two days she could keep no food down; on the third day she peed dark brown, and she wondered why disaster was never over in her life but continued to open and unfold like a package with a hideous message at its center. For once she felt herself going under without even outrage to sustain her; tears formed in her eyes; everything hurt, she burned a low fever. “Something with your liver,” the doctor said.

  “Something wrong, you mean,” Rhoda laughed. She had the bitter taste in her mouth of rising bile. Apparently the cure was to stay still and take drugs. “Rest,” the doctor said, “is absolutely essential. I know you—you’ll want to be up and around. Don’t, don’t, don’t get up before I tell you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Rhoda said, and closed her eyes.

  The fever kept her weak while a vague internal ache made her sleep fitful. In the continual drowsy state of illness she did not want to leave her bed; the mattress seemed dear and enveloping, and when Maisie turned the pillow so that the cool side lay against her cheek she felt a childish pleasure in the clean-smelling percale. She did not ask why she was sick, she did not think about getting well, she had ceased to argue the matter mentally. She was bedridden for three weeks, and in the succession of days and nights filled with trailing naps and desultory reading, she floated—in the afternoons especially—toward a dim, still realm of resignation. She had hardly allowed herself entrance into this sensation before, and although afterwards she was to feel some shame for it, in this brief period she permitted herself to succumb to the pale, calm rapture of defeat.

  At the end of the second week she began to take some notice of the movement of the household around her. Her brothers came and wearied her with talk. One evening Suzanne, on her own initiative, carried the television set into Rhoda’s room. Suzanne swayed under the weight of the big steel chassis; she was strong but she was clumsy—she made a suspicious scraping noise lowering the set down onto the night table. “Kerplunk!” Rhoda said, not cheerfully. “Lift it up—I can see—you certainly took a slice out of the varnish there, didn’t you?”

  At three in the afternoons she watched Bess Myerson swirl in her mink coat on The Big Payoff, and she saw pitiable women compete in parading their misfortunes in hopes of being selected Queen for a Day. She knew when Suzanne was home from school by the sounds of records being played in her room, the same tunes over and over.

  Suzanne asked serious questions about the symptoms and advised her against getting up too soon, but she was neglectful in a grim, distant way, and kept out of the sickroom. Either Maisie or Claire brought the trays with her meals on them; Claire was almost eleven now and could cook most simple things—she went in for artistic touches (she was hurt if Rhoda failed to notice)—a dollop of jelly in a cut-glass dish, a marigold in a water tumbler, an invented blend of fruit juices for variety. Rhoda smacked her lips in appreciation, as if she cared about these things.

  Difficulty in digestion robbed her of any pleasure she might have had in eating, and she was confined to the spiceless, bland-textured diet of invalids. What was it her mother used to call it? ABC food—Already Been Chewed; she used to say it was like what mother dogs fed their litters when they were weaning them.

  She thought of her mother’s small, square-shouldered body, subjected for a year to the humiliation of dying slowly in bed. To the last she had “kept herself up,” kept her joking and her concern with the presentation of her person—hadn’t she had her nails done the day she died? A lesson, Rhoda thought. She perceived with a sudden shock that it was too soon—she was too young—to begin emulating her mother’s behavior in her final days.

  But in her confused and slow recovery, the constant napping in the daytime, repetition seemed natural and everything seemed familiar; nothing new or fresh could permeate the sickroom. There was an internal pattern in her life she was coming to know, as a woman with too many children might know the signs of unwanted pregnancy. In her most dispirited musings she kept returning to the fact of Leonard’s death, which seemed to catch like a hook at whatever fabric of events flowed past it.

  But it was only in the low fevers that she let dread bleed into resignation and indulged herself in such visions; as she began to recover her old strength she hardened again into simple irritability. At breakfast she snapped at Claire for bringing a half-filled cup of tea and sent her back down again to return with a properly full cup. She was restless; she ventured downstairs to supervise Maisie and suggest that she vacuum behind the sofa. She stayed downstairs too long and she was suddenly burdened by a sinking fatigue; when she rested, her heart raced defiantly within the weakened frame. Falling asleep in her bed, she had those waves of soft childish peacefulness that came with being sick; she felt sentimental after her nap. When Claire brought up the afternoon tea—staring at it with her lips pursed, trying to balance the tray so the hot water didn’t all seep into the saucer—Rhoda’s eyes filled with tenderness and she said, “Oh, that looks lovely, let me take it.” She sucked the tea up noisily as a sort of joke to show her gratitude. “Ah, that’s good.” She lowered her voice. “I love ’oo, Clairsie Coo.”

  “Me too, Moo,” Claire said, clearing the juice glass from the table and trying to look efficient. Rhoda wondered for a moment if she were being mocked, but it was only that sticky excesses of affection sounded more mannered and facetious from other people’s lips than from your own.

  Claire was all right; only she was nearing puberty, growing very modest about her body and very stingy with her caresses. She wouldn’t snuggle in bed any more; she said she was too old. Everything was tinged with sex at that age; there was nothing more prudish than a pre-pubescent girl. It occurred to Rhoda that the real deprivation of widowhood wasn’t the frustration of desire, which waned of its own accord, but the fact that the only times she was ever held were when relatives hugged her at family gatherings. She missed Leonard physically—which was not at all the same as merely missing him sexually—it had to do with the remembered feel of him as a discrete bodily shape, the lost habits.

  Hinda and Annie came to visit; she had neglected them of late, but they were loyal and refrained from mentioning it. She sent Claire to bring an extra chair into the bedroom. She felt a flush of resentment that they might sit fully clothed on chairs, while she could only prop herself against the headboard and draw her robe around her shoulders.

  “The President has a heart attack and she doesn’t want to be upstaged so she gets sick too,” Annie said. “Isn’t that just like her though? We’re onto you, Rhode.”

  Suzanne came home from school with a book from the library for her, a murder mystery that Mrs. Salt the librarian, a woman with surprisingly lurid tastes, had recommended—Mickey Spillane, of all things. “Who wants to read that crap?” Rhoda said. “Get it off the bed—watch out, you’re going to knock over the juice.”

  “You must be getting better,” Suzanne said. “You’re getting nasty again.”

  “Smart kid,” Annie said.

  “You’d never know it from her school work,” Rhoda said.

  No one would ever know anything from Suzanne’s school work (Rhoda explained as Suzanne stood there) because she failed to do it, except for science. She stood a good chance of flunking ninth-grade English if she didn’t hand in the term project, which was to write your own autobio
graphy. Suzanne said it was absurd for fourteen-year-olds to recollect their life stories and anyway it was nobody’s business. Rhoda said it was meant to be an exercise in composition and not in confession. “Don’t be such a smart aleck,” she said. “Just do it.”

  “Take it easy. When you get better you can aggravate yourself about these things,” Annie said.

  “A prophet,” Rhoda said.

  Into the sickroom occasionally came the sound of Suzanne practicing her clarinet for the school band. She had played the instrument for years, always producing the same reedy, tuneless wavering. Now she rehearsed shrill marches and pounding football songs, annoying in new ways.

  Her one friend in school was one of the few other females in the woodwinds section, a bug-eyed, freckled girl named Natalie, whose father was the vice-president of some company. The family lived in a large house surrounded by vast acreage, on which, in their permissive Gentile way, they allowed their daughter to keep a variety of pets. She had a goat (until the neighbors cited a violation of the zoning ordinance and made her get rid of it), an enormous green macaw that whistled like a train and could draw blood if it bit you, and an aquarium (Suzanne reported) with neon gobies, angelfish, and some spined monstrosity called a hogfish; for a while she had kept rabbits until the Russian wolfhound had gotten into the garage and eaten them.

  Suzanne was supposed to be confined to the house after school so that she’d be compelled to do her homework, but she ignored this dictum and still spent most of her time at Natalie’s house. The amazing thing was that she would never lie about it, never bother to invent alibis about research at the library or band practice. Suzanne never told lies because the last thing she wanted to do was to placate anybody. She was quite high and mighty about it. Not so with Claire—Claire was a squirmer. She read her English compositions aloud at night and they were full of nauseating cuteness—“Boy! Was my face red!” or “What fun they had—never would Judy and Marcy forget their day in the country”—smarmy with the desire to please; she was a good student.

  “Very nice,” Rhoda would say. “Lively.” Claire would dash around the house, whipping the pages in front of the dog’s face. The dog flicked his ears, confused. “He’s going to throw up on the carpet if he gets wind of what’s on those pages,” Suzanne said.

  Rhoda received a phone call from the school giving warning that Suzanne would be forced to repeat ninth-grade English if she didn’t hand in her term paper within the next month. Rhoda didn’t understand how a child couldn’t be made to do a simple thing like that—she had been too lenient with Suzanne. The school suggested that she might be driven to the task by having her confidence bolstered at home. “A person with your I.Q. could knock this paper out in no time,” Rhoda said. “I feel sorry for the others when yours is in there as a standard of comparison. A person with your reading background. Think about it.”

  This was so unlike anything that usually transpired between them that Suzanne stared at her. “Do you think you’re talking to one of your friends?” she said. “That’s what you always sound like with them. That cooing condescending crap.”

  “My friends have not complained,” Rhoda said.

  “Some of them are as far gone as you are,” Suzanne said. “You probably can’t talk straight any more.”

  “I don’t need to hear this,” Rhoda said. “You do this sort of thing in school too, don’t you?”

  Suzanne had taken to heckling and correcting her teachers. The slightest narrowing of fact, the merest shading into opinion, made her wild. She was, according to her own notion of the truth, a pathological truth-teller in the way that people were pathological liars. In the dullest, blandest classes—history, geography, French—she fought with an odd, savage insistence on the harshness of the real nature of things.

  There followed an almost nightly series of increasingly severe confrontations. Suzanne would be discovered after dinner standing by the closet, pulling on her jacket. Rhoda would try to keep her temper as she quizzed her as to where she thought she was going. Rhoda almost admired the austerity of her responses; in her awkward way she had a surly dignity. She was stony and sullen but she was not hysterical in the manner of most teenagers. Her rare fits of temper were low-pitched and terrible; she roared, as Rhoda said, like a wounded bear. Her language was violent and ugly; never were obscenities more piercing than when they issued from her taut mouth; shit became, not just a figure of speech, but genuine excrement, so immediate was the revulsion with which she hissed the words.

  “You don’t talk like that in this house,” Rhoda said. She had to dam the torrent of abuse before it despoiled the surfaces of her one safe zone. She was frightened of Suzanne. She reached out to smack her in the face, to stop her in her tracks (that was the phrase for it in her mind), and she was right, at the impact of the slap Suzanne’s face melted and she became once again a normal, girlish figure, dissolved in tears. “I’m sorry,” Rhoda said, “but I had to do that.” Suzanne made no protest, she hid her face in her hands and waved Rhoda away when she tried to come closer, edging back from her. “What are you afraid of?” Rhoda said. She had been ready to comfort her. “Don’t worry. No one’s bothering you now.”

  Suzanne lifted her face for a moment—it was red and contorted like an infant’s face, raw with the strain of crying; suddenly she shouted, “I’m going out of here and you can’t stop me. You’re so sick. No one can stand to listen to you. It’s disgusting. You think if I write this paper I’ll be such a wonderful person. You don’t know what you think. Every time you open your mouth a lie comes out.” Rhoda was slapping her again. Suzanne’s skin was wet as Rhoda’s hand came across it; this time Suzanne did not hide her head but stood there squinting; her nose was running. “And more is coming,” Rhoda said darkly. She had no idea what she meant by the threat—what more was there? more hitting?—but she wanted Suzanne to know that some punishment would always lie ahead of her defiance. Rhoda herself felt sick and dizzy, tingling with the internal vibrations of rage. When she lifted her hand to hit she felt that she was doing it as part of a struggle to keep her balance. “Have you had enough?” she called out. “Haven’t you had enough?” It was half a threat and half a plea.

  There was no answer but Suzanne bolted finally—so much for her taking a bold stand—and ran like a rabbit, shamefaced and skittish, up the stairs; they could hear her slamming the door to her room.

  Claire, who had watched the whole thing from the kitchen, skulked through the living room with her eyes down as though avoiding the scene of a crime, and went into the den. She seated herself before the TV and turned on what must have been a Western—a harmonica was playing “Down in the Valley, the Valley So Low.” “Suzanne has a really bad mouth, doesn’t she?” Claire called back to her mother.

  “Don’t start up,” Rhoda said. “I’m fit to be tied as it is.” Whenever one girl was punished, the other one always got arrogant through pride of having escaped. On the TV a man’s twangy voice was singing, “Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.” It made Rhoda think of what Maisie said; Maisie played the organ for her Baptist choir—she was devout and conservative and she thought the bus boycotts in the South were making a lot of trouble for nothing because the world, she said, was supposed to be just what it was, a Vale of Tears and a Valley of Humiliation. The phrases, heavy and cloying with flowery tragedy, were commonplace to her, and she did not look particularly inspired as she said them. “They teach you that in church, don’t they?” Rhoda had said, but now she had a sudden vision of the valley, the vale of tears Maisie spoke of—it was a sighing, rain-misted place, sweetly desolate and windblown, exactly like what the man’s voice sounded like when he sang, hear the wind blow, and held the notes in the chorus. A place of slow melancholy and decent mourning, much nicer than the moil and toil of earth. Claire was singing along; she knew the words from school. “Maria Callas you’re not,” Rhoda said. She was thinking what humiliation really meant, something ugly and spitting. “Who’s she?” Clair
e said, and kept on singing.

  As soon as she felt well enough, Rhoda went back to teaching school. She was driving home one afternoon from a particularly successful, steady day with a group of smart sixth-graders, and she passed through Front Street just as the junior high was letting out. Kids were pouring out of the building in a chaotic gush which, over the course of a block, broke into smaller clusters. The girls looked carefully cute, with their streaks of bright coral lipstick and the smooth ironed bodices of their man-tailored shirts. The boys carried their books on their hips while the girls all carried them buttressed under their breasts; they bobbed behind them, occasionally calling out to each other or breaking out into a teasing chase. Amid the stream, which thinned out into different streets, Rhoda caught sight of two girls who walked with a drooping, listless gait, and were continually passed by the others. They stopped, annoyed, when a boy elbowed past them roughly, but they did not quicken their steps and they continued, absorbed in conversation with each other. Rhoda saw that they were Suzanne and Natalie.

  Surrounded by their bouncing, monkeyish contemporaries, with their slow, sodden walk they were like nuns in a playground or spinsters at a prom. It was apparent to Rhoda that all the others were somehow animated by sex; Suzanne, although she was their physical equal (not that she would ever have the startlingly large bust Rhoda was amused to see on some of these young girls), was untouched by sex. She was stranger than that. Rhoda almost would have preferred—if there had to be problems—that she had been too fast instead of too slow. Of all things not to care about.