Household Words

by Joan Silber

  So Rhoda was genuinely surprised when Suzanne brought home Francine Scazzi. Francine was a small, pretty, cheap-looking girl who wore too much makeup and rolled her skirts up at the waist to make them shorter. She did not seem very bright, but she was quiet and well-mannered—humble even; she shook Rhoda’s hand formally when they met (which was unusual for a girl that age) and at dinner she turned down steak because it was Friday. She rolled her dark-lined eyes when she spoke of how strict her father was. She laughed at Rhoda’s jokes, faintly embarrassed at their boldness. “Plato caldo,” Rhoda said, passing a hot serving-dish of broccoli to her, to let her know that she knew a few words in Italian, and Francine looked up, startled, and smiled uncertainly; she was a sweet, simple creature.

  “Mother,” Suzanne said, “don’t show off.”

  Rhoda could not fathom what the two girls could possibly have in common; it turned out that Suzanne was tutoring Francine in English. The week before exams Francine was at the house every day after school; they retreated to Suzanne’s room, from which Rhoda could occasionally hear Suzanne’s flat voice explaining and Francine’s high, breathy answers.

  The Sunday before exam week was Father’s Day. It was a fixed custom, by this time, to visit the cemetery on Father’s Day, to plant geraniums and weed the grass away from the footstone. A few hours, Rhoda told Suzanne, couldn’t make that much difference in anyone’s studying.

  The wind, as they walked from the parking lot, was quite strong; the cemetery was as large as most parks, and its treeless acreage acted, Suzanne said, like the moors in England, which also attracted winds. They followed the concrete paths, which forked here and there around a large ostentatious monument.

  Claire dug holes where Rhoda pointed, on either side of the wide, slightly glittery rose-brown headstone with Leonard’s name and dates on it, and Suzanne carefully loosened the plants from their pots and patted them into the earth. For once the girls worked nicely together, although only Claire really liked coming here—Suzanne had once pointed out that the geraniums always died by the next year before anyone but the caretaker saw them.

  The actual putting-in of the plants was more like work than like a ceremony, and had no inherent dignity. Nonetheless the occasion (even when Rhoda had done the work herself and worn her gardening gloves) had always had great solemnity for her.

  Suzanne was walking back to the caretaker’s lodge to get some water to soak the plants with. Both girls had always been very quiet here. They had certainly never complained about being cheated out of a national holiday, they didn’t seem envious of other families, they didn’t—nowadays—seem to like the idea of families altogether. Claire had already announced that she didn’t think she wanted to have any children, and Suzanne, who was so surly about having to go to relatives’ houses for dinner, wouldn’t even watch TV shows that involved members of a common household who weren’t criminals. Rhoda, not a sentimental person, had at least had rosier notions on the subject at their ages, a sweeter eagerness. But it was quite obvious—they had made it evident many times—that they thought her idea of happiness was inadequate.

  Traffic was thick on the ride home, they got back later than expected, and Suzanne immediately biked over to Francine’s house. Rhoda thought this was a good sign, and might portend improvements. When the grades came out, Francine had passed with a C while Suzanne, who got an A-minus on the exam, had flunked nonetheless because she’d never handed in her autobiography. (She had incidentally also failed Sewing because she’d never finished making a sleeveless blouse.)

  “You did this on purpose,” Rhoda said bitterly, signing Suzanne’s report card. “Do you know what this means?” It meant her college record was permanently stained with an F. It meant that she had abdicated the only thing of obvious merit in her person, which was her intelligence.

  “I give up,” Suzanne said. “What does it mean?” It was sheer, stubborn, stupid rebellion, intransigence of the most useless order. For days Rhoda followed Suzanne about the house, hissing at her; she would not let her be. Even Hinda, hearing Rhoda’s long, agonized rants over the phone, urged her to let the subject rest and give herself some peace. Suzanne said nothing; she sat in front of the TV set for hours and did not turn around when she was addressed.

  Rhoda had lengthy conferences at the school where, by agreeing with their harsh appraisals of Suzanne’s conduct, she got them to consent to let her make up the credits in summer school. Suzanne did not balk at having to go.

  That summer she continued her loose friendship with Francine Scazzi, who was evidently of some genuine interest because her father was a landscape gardener, so she knew about plants. Francine obviously found Suzanne strange and remarkable. Natalie still came to the house, but never at the same time as Francine. Natalie dismissed Francine as bubble-headed, while Francine said Natalie was “faggy,” which—Rhoda was relieved to discover—did not imply homosexuality (she had once had suspicions about the girls’ intense attachment), but meant that she lacked the proper flair and wore the wrong things.

  One afternoon a car pulled up at the house—a hotrod of some sort with a design of flames stencilled on the sides; in it were Suzanne and an older boy with greased hair who turned out to be Richie Scazzi, one of Francine’s brothers. He had given Suzanne a ride home, which was innocent enough, but on the way Suzanne had unfortunately discovered that he worked as an exercise boy at the racetrack. When she came into the house she was all excited that he had offered to let her come visit the stables.

  Rhoda was powerless to forbid her, since out-and-out orders always solidified her defiance. Rhoda also doubted that his motives were base: a boy like that could do better for himself than succumb to the negligible attractions of a fifteen-year-old with pitted skin and glasses and a square, childish build.

  After one visit to the track Suzanne’s coat smelled like a barnyard and there was no getting the smell out; it was ineradicable, like garlic or grease smoke. She described with great seriousness how Richie had let her help brush some concoction of cornstarch onto a horse’s ankles to make them look whiter. Rhoda did not think of horses as beautiful—they had skinny legs totally out of proportion to their chesty bodies: no one ever seemed to mention this. Suzanne didn’t know how to ride, herself; she was interested in horses in a technical way—she was already learning the victories and the running records of champions the way small boys memorized baseball statistics.

  Suzanne made repeated visits to the track—Rhoda was not sure how often—but once, at dinner, she told them that Richie had been kicked and suffered a bruised rib from grooming a colt who was ticklish under the barrel. “He’s okay, though,” she said. “He says that sort of thing happens all the time, they get used to it around the track.”

  “Very brave,” Rhoda snorted. “He sounds like a horse’s ass himself, if you ask me.”

  “Most of the horses are tame,” Suzanne said. “You can pet their muzzles and they sort of gum your hand, checking to see if you have any food. They have very soft loose lips, but their teeth are enormous.” It struck Rhoda as odd that Suzanne, who was so meticulous about some things and went into paroxysms of disgust if a line of fat showed up on her own plate of meat, should especially like the moist flappy chops of an animal otherwise admired for its muscular tautness. “I hope you’re not sticking your hands into any horse’s mouth,” she said.

  “Oh, Mother,” Suzanne said. “You don’t know anything really, do you?”

  The flavor of the racetrack seemed innocent and old-fashioned—like a Jackie Coogan movie, after all. Suzanne came back with words like “cross-tie” and “dandy brush,” and explanations of how putting oil around a horse’s eyes made him look “typey.” It was classy and low-class at the same time—no doubt there were unsavory characters around the track, but Suzanne really had nothing to do with the gambling part—it was all so anachronistic in a time of hotrods as to make it seem eccentric rather than dangerous: only Suzanne could have come up with such an interest. It was Richi
e that Rhoda worried about.

  His car stopped before their house with the brakes squealing, and peeled out of the driveway at highway speed. He belonged to the only jacket gang in town, a sort of bikeless motorcycle club whose rites Rhoda could only hear hints of; they seemed to be bad only in a loafing, sullen way. They confined themselves to verbally terrorizing anyone who walked past a certain candy store where they stood outside, and drag-racing on a particular strip of the parkway. Last Halloween one of them had stuck a lit cherry bomb up a cat’s ass and thrown it out a car window so the animal exploded on a policeman’s lawn. Rhoda could not believe Suzanne condoned anything like this—she who was so tender toward animals and in her own way so proper, who always reacted negatively to mindless, boisterous behavior.

  Still, Richie Scazzi had an influence on her. She spent hours in her room listening to radio stations that played what Rhoda called jungle-bunny music. She never adopted makeup but she took to wearing a black head-scarf like Francine’s, draped around the neck and tied from behind. It made her face paler, which may well have been its goal, because she did look older in that guise. For a while her appearance was an odd amalgam—her hair forced into a bouffant ruffled with cowlicks where her rollers had failed to catch the end-hairs, her collars turned up at the back of the neck to look tough, and her old plaid Bermuda shorts, pleated skirts, and decidedly unsexy baggy socks. Then she had her hair cut short and straight with bangs, the sort of cut small children had before they went to camp; on Suzanne it was adamantly plain, but it gave her looks a more coherent aspect; she had obviously decided to look intimidating by looking masculine.

  That summer Suzanne took to staying in her room all day. Rhoda, who read much of the night, longed for morning and woke in a blind, cheerful relief. When she made the beds she beat the pillows until the feathers re-gathered into plumped and regular shapes; she wanted everything to stand up, smooth its edges, and take shape; her own severe vigor filled the household like the workings of a bellows, just as Maisie’s pounding at the ironing board could make a collar stand up without starch.

  Tasks had to be done in the morning so that the household didn’t linger, sagging under its own slovenliness, and corrupt the day. In the midst of her motions from room to room she was stopped before the closed doors of her daughters’ bedrooms; Claire could be roused by repeated knocking at around ten, but Suzanne’s quarters were like a tomb in which she slept, in defiance of all noise, with the blinds drawn against the daylight. “She’s like those ghouls that sleep in their coffins all day,” Rhoda told Maisie. It did seem to her that Suzanne’s clinging to sleep was a shameful simulation of death, and, like everything she did, a deliberate abdication of her own advantages: fresh air, late summer, youth. In a real sense she was wasting away, despite the fact that she was strong, healthy, and well-fleshed. When Rhoda reached down to shake her awake, she noticed that Suzanne’s face didn’t, like most people’s, go slack and childlike in sleep; her features were tightened and hard, she seemed to be squinting with her eyes closed. She wore, oddly, flannel pajamas even in summer.

  Andy had said recently that Suzanne was getting to look more like Leonard every day, and it was true: she had his straight-cut, slanting eyebrows and his square jaw; she would be solid and handsome when her cheekbones came out a little more. Rhoda still kept a picture of Leonard on her dresser; she had recently been startled to notice that his face was now younger than hers. Claire liked to take down the photograph and look at it; she had once, from reading those Victorian children’s books they always stocked in school libraries, asked to have a miniature copy of the portrait to keep in her locket. Rhoda, surprised and touched, had gone to the camera store and had them make up a little postage-stamp-sized print. Within a month the picture in the locket developed white spots on it like a mold—from Claire’s habit of wearing the locket when she bathed, Rhoda discovered; in time the surface of the portrait had dissolved into pulp.

  Unlike Claire, Suzanne never asked questions about her father, but she occasionally showed remarkable turns of memory (she remembered, for instance, that Leonard had always carried a penknife, which Rhoda herself had forgotten). The constant presence of the particular photograph on her dresser had permanently shaped Rhoda’s remembrance of him; you could guess the date it had been taken by the high, broad collar on his shirt and the width of his tie. Sometimes she saw him in dreams as he’d actually been, and his expression was different. He stroked his nose, as though rubbing it to a shine, and sniffed. He seemed quite foreign to her—she was shocked at how much she’d left out in her habitual image—the vividness of him was terrible, and yet she was flooded with gratitude at the gift of his presence again.

  What she hated most about these dreams of Leonard was that they brought to her, like a headache, the notion that she had never come to rest in any feeling. She had to forget this again until the next dream came. Suzanne’s face was like Leonard’s faults—his disapproval and his stiff virtues—come back to haunt her.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Rhoda asked, shaking Suzanne until she opened her eyes. “You’re not sick. Get up. Do you hear me? I’m talking to you. I’m pulling the covers off—it’s time already. Stop holding on, it won’t do you any good.” Suzanne was still too weakened with sleep to grip powerfully; Rhoda pried her fingers from the top of the seersucker coverlet and in one fierce jerk stripped the covers from the bed, exposing Suzanne in her faded, none-too-clean pajamas; the sheet caught at the end on one of her toenails—Suzanne yelped and the fabric ripped. “Now get up,” Rhoda said. “Have you had enough? Get up.”

  Suzanne rose from the bed, saying nothing; she walked to the bathroom, where she spent an hour in the tub. Nothing could make her move quickly. Reading magazines in her bathrobe, she lingered over breakfast until three. “I can’t stand it,” Rhoda said. “What are you, a vegetable? Stink in the house all day. Go ahead, see if I care.”

  At the end of August Rhoda received a letter in the mail announcing that Suzanne had not succeeded in fulfilling the requirements of her summer school courses and the school was currently reviewing her case and considering whether it was appropriate to take the drastic measure of having her “left back.”

  “So you’ll forget about college for her,” Annie Marantz said. “She’ll get married, or she’ll go to work for a veterinarian somewhere. She likes animals better than people anyway.”

  “What are you saying?” Rhoda said. “That girl has an I.Q. higher than both of ours put together. And you think she has a future shoveling shit. That’s very nice, thank you very much.” She felt tears actually rise to her eyes; she had marshalled all her energies being furious with Suzanne—Annie’s useless advice suddenly formed a gap through which the real pain seeped. For spite, it was all for spite: why should her own children thrash out against her? No matter what you did. Like babies spitting up on you the good milk you gave them. An innate defiance seemed to form in them with the hardening of their bones. But Rhoda felt that she could’ve put up with anything predictably awful. What she couldn’t stand was the especial freakishness of her own situation—a condition which had leaked into her life despite her never, through any extravagance of her own nature, having done anything to tempt catastrophe.

  No matter what you did. She remembered that man Bev Davis had tried to foist off on her—Eddie Lederbach the blacklist martyr—how he kept whining It’s not fair and how childish she had thought that. Recalling him was exactly like remembering a sentimental song you had gagged over but that stuck with you, so that eventually you came to participate in its meaning. She no longer hated Eddie Lederbach, it was normal people she hated. Annie, thinking she knew anything: she had married, much too young, that slug of a husband, and she had borne him two boys and a girl. They were not sweet, simple children—they were full of hypocritical enthusiasms and sly jocularity; but they were almost mawkishly attached to their parents. She considered Annie unremarkable and her husband cowardly; she herself was remarkable, brave. How was
it that in the face of all that had happened to her, she hadn’t learned anything that was of any use to her? She was full of old sores; everything galled, hurt, chafed, and nothing healed.

  “Don’t get so excited,” her brother Frank said. “You take everything too much to heart. Einstein flunked math in school, did you know that? Is she a juvenile delinquent, does she go around stabbing people or stealing cars or getting pregnant? She doesn’t even cut school, there’s nothing wrong with her attendance record. You could really have things to worry about—think of some other parents—but you don’t.”

  “Please,” Rhoda said. “I have enough aggravation already without having to be grateful about it, too.” Really, she was starting to sound like Job talking to his comforters.

  Suzanne returned to school as half a repeating freshman and half a sophomore (under the cajoling conditions that if she did well she might be a regular tenth-grader by the second semester). In her social life—such as it was—she also seemed to occupy some nether-world. Natalie still came to visit, but she was obviously put off by Suzanne’s tougher style. Francine, puzzled but admiring, came by occasionally; Rhoda guessed that Suzanne still had some contact with Francine’s brother but he was no longer allowed in the house—Rhoda had put her foot down; “Richie Scuzzy” she called him, over Suzanne’s whines to “stop saying that.” Suzanne smoked now; at first it had been furtive (Rhoda could smell smoke in the house when Suzanne was in her bedroom thinking she was being so sly); now she openly sat out on the front porch after dinner with a lit cigarette, dragging on it in a vague, distracted way.