Household Words

by Joan Silber

  She sat out on the porch as Rhoda’s father had done (no one else would tolerate those unstable, dented aluminum chairs, but neither of them seemed to notice), and Rhoda thought that he was perhaps the one person in the family whom Suzanne most deeply resembled. She had never expected to see her father in her own house again (and had in fact begun using his old room for storage), but he was doing surprisingly well at the Sarah Stinson Finn Home—apparently the care was good: it cost enough—and there was an excellent chance that he would, as the administrators said, soon be returned to the comfort of his family.

  While Suzanne idled on the front porch and Claire sat at the kitchen table doing homework, Rhoda sorted through coats in the hall closet, seeing which ones she would drop off at the cleaners the next day. She had bought Suzanne a new plaid wool topcoat for fall, but Suzanne persisted in wearing that loathsome corduroy jacket from four years ago (she had shot up all at once at the onset of puberty, but she’d grown very little since then—it fit her as well as it ever had, shapeless garment that it was). A cleaning wouldn’t hurt it, although the lining looked as though it would dissolve into shreds if you blew on it. She felt in the pockets to make sure no change or Kleenex was there, and she came upon a long object, plastic and metal, shaped like a very narrow folding comb. When she withdrew it she saw that it was a penknife, white mother-of-pearl with palm trees painted crudely on it. She ran her thumb across the handle and when she touched a dot like the top of a screw, a blade flashed out suddenly. She was so startled she almost dropped it on herself; it was like an animal baring its teeth with no warning. A switchblade: a gift from Richie Scazzi? Something to impress Richie Scazzi? She pressed the button again to get the lethal spurt of metal out of sight; and then she pressed it again, this time just to see the gadgetry of it once more. It made a hissing, snapping sound; she felt her adrenaline rising, she was excited with the horror of it, and then she was suddenly amused at the picture of herself, a housewife in a closet, sheathing and unsheathing a weapon and threatening the coats like Don Quixote.

  It was not funny. Suzanne really carried this thing, which was not designed for innocent whittling or breaking string. She felt it every time she put her hand in her pocket, left it nonchalantly in her school locker every day, and at night smuggled it back into their house, the Taber house. Rhoda did not think, past the first minute of alarm, that Suzanne would ever use it on purpose; she was sometimes a bully but she was not a sadist; the sight of blood made her woozy—she had once thrown up at the dentist’s office after seeing her own tooth on a piece of cotton. It was an extended version of carrying a rabbit’s foot, symbolic armature merely: except that she might brag about it to the wrong person and find herself in real trouble. Even if she only played mumbletypeg in private—what did she do with it?—that blade was sharp and treacherous-looking, and could lead to nasty accidents, self-mutilations.

  That motif of palm trees on the handle: in the forties anything tropical stood for luxury—here it was meant to appeal to some pride-of-origin—and what did Suzanne have to do with that? It was a knife for some hood with greased hair and tattoos to carry.

  Rhoda stood in the doorway and called out to Suzanne on the porch, “You’d better come in here. I want to talk to you.”

  “Later,” Suzanne said. “When I’m finished with this cigarette.”

  “I have something to speak to you about, and I’m not going to discuss it in front of the whole neighborhood. You’d better come inside.”

  “I’m almost finished,” Suzanne said. “Just leave me alone for a second instead of bothering me.”

  “Leave you alone?” Rhoda said. “You’re not making sense, Suzanne. No one comes near you. You don’t have throngs of people around that I can see. No one except that droopy Natalie. Who is bothering you all the time, I would like to know. Not me, I’ve got better things to do.” Rhoda approached Suzanne in the shadow of the yellow bug-light under the mansard; she opened her palm to show her the knife. “I found it in your pocket,” she whispered.

  Once in the house Rhoda let her voice rise. “Who gave it to you? That’s what I want to know first. How did you get this?”

  Suzanne shrugged. “What were you doing going through my pockets?”

  “What possible reason could you have for carrying this? Do you go to some ghetto school where your life is menaced under every stairway? Does every other girl in the school walk around carrying a thing like this?”

  “I doubt it,” Suzanne said.

  “What is the matter with you? That’s really the point, isn’t it? That you have to equip yourself like some moral defective.”

  “You better give it back,” Suzanne said. “It’s mine, you know.”

  “You must think I’m crazy. You think I would let you bring this in the house and keep it?”

  “All right then, suppose I go destroy some object that belongs to you. That would be fair, wouldn’t it? You had no business putting your goddamned hands in my pockets.”

  Rhoda was shouting, and Suzanne was barking back her senseless replies thick with obscenities. They were shouting for a long time, repeating, it was tedious and it was useless. In the end Suzanne stormed up to her room. In an hour she was downstairs and had the TV on.

  Having the knife was the worst thing Suzanne had done, and yet the fight had the form of every fight; nothing mattered. Rhoda felt that she was being smothered in repetition and that all disasters in her life were coming to have the same meaning.

  The thing about Suzanne, Rhoda thought later, was that her outer behavior was flat but her imagination was macabre. She was like one of those prim nineteenth-century clerks with a drawerful of secret fetishes—yellowed newspaper clips of freak murders, knotted riding crops. Adolescents did, of course, have distorted self-images, which led to reckless experiment. Patsy Jawitz had just dyed a white streak in her hair out of thinking she was a femme fatale; the chemical stress of trying to re-dye it dark again (at her mother’s insistence) had made it turn greenish; Mrs. Jawitz was inconsolable. Rhoda’s advice to her had been not to take these things too seriously: kids took themselves too seriously, it was up to adults to laugh at them.

  But Patsy had at least made a misguided attempt at glamor. What disturbed Rhoda about Suzanne’s transgression was not just that she had the knife, but that she had wanted it in the first place. On whom did she imagine herself using it? She probably didn’t really know: what did she know? It was the not knowing that was dangerous.

  The next evening Rhoda went out to walk the dog just before supper. It was a chilly autumn night; the air smelled of frost and of smoke; someone on the block had been burning leaves. It was a poignant smell—sweetly nostalgic although not specific to any memory. The windows of her own house glowed yellow and when she went inside the heat felt wonderful: the comforts of home. Claire was setting the table and wanting to know why they couldn’t turn the thermostat up, she was freezing. “You have thin blood,” Rhoda told her. “Go get a sweater from upstairs.”

  Suzanne came into the kitchen as Rhoda was peering into the oven; she dropped her schoolbooks on the counter, and one of them hit the floor and thundered. “You did that on purpose to annoy me,” Rhoda said. “I almost burned myself here.” Then she looked up and saw Suzanne’s face—compressed and stiff and furious.

  “I found out what you did,” Suzanne said. “You went to the racetrack and told them not to let me hang around there.” She was bellowing. “Don’t try to deny it. Don’t lie the way you always do. You deliberately humiliated me. You went behind my back.”

  “I should have done it long ago. And they agreed with me. They always wondered what you were doing there in the first place. They knew you didn’t belong there.”

  “You think this was such a triumph for you—telling them I had a genius I.Q. but I was ruining my future with them. I don’t know how you thought you could threaten them with the police—they thought that was pretty bizarre. You think people are insects, you can insult them and they won�
�t notice. You don’t know anything about what really goes on in the world and you never will because you do the same things over and over. You should lock yourself in a closet and rot, that’s where you belong.”

  Suzanne was almost spitting as she spoke; she squinted and hissed and flared her lips wetly. Rhoda raised her arm to stop her the only way she knew how; she had not hit Suzanne for some time but now she was asking for it; Rhoda smacked her smartly across the cheek. Suddenly something lashed painfully into Rhoda’s face; Suzanne had swung out with the back of her hand and swiped her flattened knuckles across the bridge of Rhoda’s nose. Rhoda heard herself roaring in terror and outrage. Her first instinct was to feel her nose to see if it had been broken—it hadn’t been hit hard enough to break, but it was soft and swollen.

  “This is horrible,” she said—her voice was low and darkly fierce, but her hand was still over her nose. Suzanne wouldn’t look at her, she was gazing at the floor. Quickly she turned and ran.

  Rhoda went to the bathroom to splash her skin with cold water; she couldn’t tell then if she’d been crying because her whole face was wet. Her eyes felt hot. When she saw herself in the mirror she gasped in disgust and pity; her features were bleary and reddened, her mouth was like a drunkard’s. She sighed and dried herself.

  She turned off the oven and all the burners on the stove and she went upstairs to her own bedroom. The Sunday papers were still piled at the foot of the bed. Her strongest urge was to hide and rest and sleep, to crawl back into animal misery as though the disaster of life were simple and physical. She pulled back the bedspread and lay under the blanket, not bothering to remove the ruffled sham-cover from the pillow, thinking I might as well live in the slums. She wondered if there was screaming and violence at Maisie’s house. Maisie kept her secrets. A Vale of Tears and a Valley of Humiliation. At least she thought she had some place to go from here.

  She was lying in the dark when Claire yelled up to ask if they were eating soon and should she start fixing the salad. She was calling out as she mounted the steps and stood at the entrance to Rhoda’s room, “It’s six o’clock already.”

  “Can’t you see I’m not feeling well?” Rhoda answered; she could see Claire’s outline in the doorway. “Just heat up all the stuff and eat it yourself. Suzanne probably isn’t coming in for supper.”

  “Yes, she is. She’s right downstairs now watching TV. We’re both starving.”

  Rhoda rose slightly and then lay her head against the pillow again. “Go ahead and eat,” she said. “See if I care. Eat, who’s stopping you?”

  Claire began to move away and then she called back, “What should I make for a cooked vegetable?”

  “Horse manure,” Rhoda said. “Don’t ask.” There was no dignity in anything. She heard the sound of their voices below and then she heard the vexing noise of pots being rattled in the cupboard. When the odors of the meal began traveling up to her—melting butter and the meat re-heated—she felt stirrings of something like an appetite for food. She heard the radio in the dinette turned on to the news and she knew that they were sitting down to supper. She felt suddenly left out, like a child put to bed without dinner, as though another sort of family sat, impossibly bright and glowing with tremulous life and health, gathered in the warm kitchen below.

  9

  SUZANNE’S BEHAVIOR WAS often subdued after a severe outburst, as though she’d scared herself. She was notably “good” for several weeks after the slapping incident, weeks during which Rhoda did not feel at all well. She lay in bed and brooded bitterly over Suzanne’s calling her dishonest; it was the last thing Rhoda would have guessed as her failing, she who had always been known as forthright, perhaps even too outspoken. She was honest enough for most people and most situations, but not for Suzanne. That was the curse of her life, Rhoda thought—her virtues were more than plenty good enough for the conditions she would have reasonably expected, but not for the unfair exception her life had become.

  In late October of that year the dog died. He was over sixteen and his indoor life had long been confined to the kitchen, where, in the helpless incontinence of old age, he had stained all the corners of the linoleum. Arthritic but still excitable, he had died in a fit of doggish bravado, growling at a cat who had perched outside the dinette window. Outraged at the cat’s insolence, he had hurled himself against the window and, in a paroxysm of hoarse barking, had gagged on his own voice and expired. Rhoda was the only one in the house at the time; she had been quite shaken, and after the vet came and removed the body, she had lain in her room all afternoon, feeling afraid and nauseous. The girls had taken it surprisingly well. “He was an old dog,” Claire kept saying.

  They did not speak much about the dog afterwards; it was hard to know what either of them thought about anything nowadays. They were each busy in their own corners of the house; they had, as they said, their own interests.

  Suzanne’s latest hobby was photography, and one evening she set up floodlights in the living room and posed Rhoda for a portrait. She muttered about shadows and angles, and she made Rhoda change her clothing twice. Rhoda was well pleased at the attention, but when she saw the printed pictures she felt that they were the cruelest ever taken of her. The fevers and her fatless diet had sapped the elasticity from her skin and left it grainy. Her features, which had always been small, no longer held the structure of her face together; she looked shrunken instead of delicate. I look like a bird, she thought, the ruin of a bird. In some ways she was reconciled to the loss: where was she going, anyway, Miss America?—as her father used to say.

  Neither of her girls was as vividly appealing as she remembered having been at their ages. She had always assumed that the girls looked like her—now she was surprised by their differences. Where had they gotten them: their darker hair, shorter waists, bowed legs? How had that happened? They told her it had always been that way.

  Claire was the prettier of the two, but in public she still had that scared-rabbit look, stiff and wincing. Suzanne refused to take her picture. “When I’m a famous actress, you’ll have to pay me to take my photograph,” Claire said. She was all keyed up about her part in the Thespian Society play; she was the only seventh-grader who’d been given a major role. They were doing The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and she was playing a younger sister, Henrietta.

  Dreamy and intense, Claire was the one who read secret books under the covers at night with a flashlight. She had none of Suzanne’s stoicism or her insistence on the truth—she would have lied in the service of any strong emotion. Already she was taking bus trips into New York with friends, “just walking around looking” (not for trouble, Rhoda hoped). She came back rapturous, complaining that their own town was “incredibly sterile” and “limited.” “You woman of the world, you,” Rhoda said. But she was vaguely glad that Claire felt the need to venture out: she saw under her affectation the burgeoning marks of a natural sophistication.

  Rhoda had received a note from the school drama coach explaining that mothers were expected to sew or “contrive from hand-me-downs” a convincing nineteenth-century costume. “How old do they think I am?” Rhoda said. “I don’t have any hand-me-downs from the nineteenth century.” But she had assured Claire that they would find something wonderfully suitable hidden in the recesses of the attic, and in the evening after supper she led Claire up the stairs to the third story.

  The attic had always been something of a mystery room to the children; the flooring was only tarpaper under the eaves and they had not been allowed there alone when they were little. Now it was filled with discarded furniture; there had been trouble with squirrels at one time and a baited humane-trap still stood in one corner. “Yuk,” Claire said, as Rhoda unzipped garment bags. “Everything smells of mothballs. What’s that?”

  It was a tiered black taffeta evening skirt which Rhoda had worn in the late forties—worn, in fact, to the dinner party for that charity Leonard had been so fired up about. The skirt had been very New Look, the black gone rusty no
w—they could bunch it at the waist with a sash and it would fit Claire. Claire swished around, holding it to her hips. Rhoda found a dotted-Swiss blouse with puffed sleeves that she had worn to teach in. “That’ll go with it,” Rhoda said. “That’s it. Looks very old-fashioned.”

  Rhoda was ready to go downstairs but Claire began picking through cartons. She wanted the uses of things explained to her. She sat in Leonard’s rowing-machine—a cumbrous steel contraption with springs and pulleys and foot-stirrups. “It might develop your bust,” Rhoda said, but Claire found it too hard to pull back the oars.

  “He was strong,” Claire said. In a carton of income tax records from 1941 Claire found a photograph with the words I left my heart in Atlantic City printed on the mounting. The picture showed Rhoda and Leonard and the Hofferbergs with their heads stuck through a painting of flowers and bumblebees. They were all laughing, like fools in a pillory. Rhoda had always thought she’d been prettiest at that stage, but she’d never been good with her hair—in the picture it was too tightly crimped, and parted in the middle, which made her nose look bigger. “Is that Daddy?” Claire said, pointing.

  She still referred to him as Daddy, since she had never known him at an age old enough to call him anything else and she couldn’t, to Rhoda, call him “my father.” She had always asked about him in that low, embarrassed voice children used for religious inquiries. They really did not speak about him very often. Leonard’s eyes, half-closed in laughter, looked kind, as Rhoda remembered them, but his mouth was clownish and slack. “It’s not a very good picture,” Rhoda said.

  There was a carton of books; Claire was going through the top layers. “Did he read this?” It was The Most-Loved Poems of the American People. “Oh, look at his handwriting.” Claire had found his signature on the flyleaf—Leonard S. Taber. There was a moment of shared gravity as they both contemplated his Palmer script. Claire turned the pages to see if he had written any notes in the margins. “Oh, look at this one. I used to know this from another book I had. “‘The night will never stay, / The night will still go by.’” She read with slightly British inflections. “‘Though with a million stars / You pin it to the sky.’”