Household Words

by Joan Silber

  Rhoda pantomimed playing a violin. “Da-da-da-dee-dah,” she sang, soap-opera background.

  “It’s not funny,” Claire said. “It’s one of the most-loved poems of the American people.” Claire took the book downstairs with her, and reported later with great disappointment that there had been no notes in the margins.

  On the evening of Claire’s play, the junior high school was lit from the outside like a monument. The auditorium, filled with several hundred parents dutifully rustling their playbills, banged with noise; schools were always loud, with their bare floors and curtainless windows—harsher and simpler than the regular world. Suzanne sat silent next to Rhoda. She wore a gray flannel suit that made her look like a prison matron.

  Claire appeared onstage about ten minutes after the play had begun. She was supposed to be the sprightly gay sister whose spirit was not broken by the tyrannical father—her voice was bouncy with expressiveness so that it squeaked, and she moved her hands Semitically when she talked. The girl who was playing Elizabeth Barrett was really very good—there was always one like that.

  Rhoda thought it was too mature a play for them. The claustrophobia of poor Elizabeth’s sickroom—all that theatrical languor and the complaints about staleness—won Rhoda’s sympathy with an intensity which surprised her. She was still weak-ish herself and she had come tonight glad to relieve the tedium of her own recent role as a stay-at-home.

  Claire was doing a bit of flirtatious business buckling a sword around the waist of her soldier suitor. The gesture made her seem suddenly older, a sexual being—of course, she was costumed and made up to be a “lady”—but the sly pertness of her tones was all hers. Rhoda had noticed it before and had chosen to be amused: all those giggling phone conversations with girlfriends, where they used code names for their crushes of the month. But the coy eroticism with which she was pawing this boy actor startled Rhoda; Claire was sneaky, she was romantic and quiveringly responsive to praise, and for all her timidity she had a reckless streak: she would have to be watched.

  After the show they waited in the hall for Claire to emerge from backstage. Rhoda heard her laughing down the corridor; they could see her waving goodbye as she turned, and for a moment Rhoda caught a glimpse of a male figure, too tall for one of Claire’s classmates, tapping his forehead in parting salute. It might have been a teacher, except that teachers didn’t wear leather jackets—it looked distinctly like Richie Scazzi. But of course he knew Claire from having seen her at the house, it was more or less natural that he should speak to her in a friendly way if he came upon her in public; he was probably there with one of his innumerable younger brothers or sisters.

  Claire walked to them, holding her rustling skirt as though she were about to curtsey; her makeup was still on—clown-white with coral circles rubbed on the cheeks, her braces gleaming under the lipstick. “Here’s the star,” Rhoda said, hugging her. “What an actress! You were great. Tomorrow night try not to say your lines so fast with your words in bunches.” But Claire had left them; she was hugging a girl who had been one of her sisters in the play.

  The next morning Rhoda was dismayed to find that she had tired herself badly from staying out late. She stayed in bed, feverish again, with no energy to move and no appetite for anything but sleep and dry toast. “Too much excitement for me,” she told Hinda, who came by after supper to drive Claire to the school. “I’m really getting to be an old biddy when watching a school play wears me out.”

  The frequency of her bouts with illness was beginning to alarm Rhoda. She had, it seemed, a bad liver, in the same way that people had bad hearts or spots on their lungs. “It’s faulty plumbing,” she told Hinda, and it did feel like pipes backing up in her system, sending undrained bile out to muddy the waters. “Mr. Dinger must have put in this set of valves and left a wrench in the works.”

  “It should only be so simple,” Hinda said. “But you can always kid about everything. Where’s the princess?”

  Claire came into the room, wearing her camel’s-hair coat over the long skirt. She looked like a country girl going to a prom. “Break a leg,” Rhoda said.

  Claire was scheduled to get a ride home from Janey Littauer’s parents. Some time well after midnight Rhoda heard a screech of brakes outside the house; she could hear Claire’s voice and a man’s voice, and then the roar of an engine with no muffler zooming down the block. The lock clicked as Claire came in the front door. She walked through the living room; from the kitchen Rhoda could hear her opening and shutting the refrigerator. Violent scenes had come to Rhoda’s mind with the violent sound of the motor—Claire with her skirt up, under the steering wheel; Claire in a ditch, raped and abandoned—but the banal noise of the refrigerator door made this seem silly. Claire was downstairs eating a piece of Jane Parker Fudge Iced Yellow Cake, she wore cotton underpants and a double-A bra: she was too young. But Richie Scazzi was not too young.

  At eight in the morning Rhoda pushed open the door to Claire’s room and slipped into bed with her daughter. Claire always slept to one side of the bed, hugging the wall in a semi-fetal position. Rhoda slid next to her back and Claire stirred slightly. “What time is it?” Claire murmured.

  “It’s early,” Rhoda said. “You can go back to sleep. What time did you get in last night?”

  “I don’t know. Late.”

  “And who drove you? I heard some hotrod outside when it was close to one o’clock.”

  Claire squirmed toward the corner so that her forehead pressed against the wallpaper. “Why don’t you let me sleep? Why can’t I ever sleep late if I want to?”

  “I want to know who you were with.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Try to remember. You’re awake now, Claire.”

  “I got a lift from Richie Scazzi. He had his car with him.”

  “You know he’s not allowed around here,” Rhoda said. “You know what I think of him. I don’t want him anywhere near the house.”

  “Well, the streets are public property,” Claire said.

  “This is the last time I want to hear about your being in company with him. Is that understood?” Claire said nothing. “Don’t be like that, Clairsie. Don’t be defiant.” Rhoda curved her arm around Claire’s waist—how tiny and light-boned she still was. Claire lay motionless, and the two of them fell asleep again.

  Rhoda woke when she felt Claire clambering over her to get out of the bed, but she was gone down to breakfast before Rhoda had a chance to speak with her further. Rhoda returned to her bedroom and slept fitfully through the early afternoon. When she heard Suzanne shuffling back from her bath in her slapping leatherette slippers, she called out to her. “Come in here a minute.” Even after a bath Suzanne’s eyes were still sleepy and her hair was tousled and spikey. “First of all, I’d like it if you could find time to fix me a soft-boiled egg. And I want to know—what is Claire doing getting rides from your friend Richie Scazzi?”

  “Even if I knew anything I wouldn’t tell you,” Suzanne said. “You would be the last person I would tell.”

  “I thought she hated hoody types. She doesn’t go for motorcycle jackets and hair tonic, she’s not that sort of kid.”

  “That was last week. She goes for anything or anybody that’s the least bit nice to her. She has no character at all. Anything for attention.”

  “I see,” Rhoda said.

  “She’s trying to reform him. She reads poetry to him.”

  “I suppose he’s developed a sudden fondness for Edna St. Vincent Millay? Keeps a copy in his back pocket next to his switchblade?”

  “If you know all about it already, you don’t have to ask me,” Suzanne said.

  Claire was definitely missing from the house more often; she no longer came home directly from school or called from a girlfriend’s house to give her whereabouts. Once, when she had no appetite for supper, she confessed to having stopped after school for a hot fudge sundae at Skeeter’s on the highway. There was no way she could have walked there. “Ric
hie Scazzi drove you there, didn’t he?” Rhoda said. “And then you went and stuffed yourself with cheap sweets and forgot everything. You forgot that we’d be eating in an hour or two, you forgot that you should be home helping me. I’ve been seriously ill, the doctor doesn’t even want me moving around, and you’re off having sundaes, that’s nice.”

  “Why can’t I go to Skeeter’s?” Claire whined. “Everybody else goes. They have home-made fudge sauce. Why can’t Maisie stay later and help you? You can pay her. You have enough money.”

  “When are you going to turn into a human being?” Rhoda said. “All these years I’ve been waiting, for both of you. I’m not against your having a social life, Claire, but you have no pride. Look at how you’re sitting, with your shoulders hunched, slumped into your plate.”

  Claire was crying. “I didn’t say I went any place with anybody,” she sobbed.

  “Don’t you think that’s enough?” Suzanne asked Rhoda. Claire looked up, surprised. It was so rare for Suzanne to defend her sister, especially when she acted “emotional,” that they all sat silent, and Rhoda let Suzanne put the radio on.

  Rhoda planned to telephone Richie Scazzi (he still lived at home, she’d learned—he wasn’t as old as she’d thought, only seventeen) and either give him a piece of her mind or request him, as a gentleman, not to take Claire for any more rides. She was framing in her mind a way to cleverly appeal to his maturity, when Hinda phoned after dinner. “As far as the Scazzi kid goes,” Hinda said, “I always felt sorry for him because he was so short. It backfired the last time you tried to interfere.”

  “He’s not so short,” Rhoda said.

  “He used to be. I don’t know the family or anything, but he was in Danny’s class. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall when he dropped out of school to become a jockey, but then he shot up to normal height, which is terrible for a jockey. He’s lucky now if they let him be an exercise boy. I suppose he cleans the stables and empties the slops and I hate to think what-all.”

  Rhoda remembered that she had never been able to actually connect Richie with Suzanne’s possession of the knife—and later she had even come to suspect Natalie, who’d traveled with her family in Mexico the summer before, and who might have tried to win back Suzanne’s favor with a gift that showed how daring she could be. Rhoda had always thought of Richie Scazzi as a thing to be gotten out of the way or jeered at. Hinda, with her benign bit of gossip, had let it be known that Richie’s outer appearance, while it probably did not hide anything Rhoda would admire, was at least the crust over a complete human existence. It brought Rhoda up short, as passages from certain books sometimes had.

  “His sister Francine was always very polite,” Rhoda said. She had already decided not to call, and was feeling pleased at this.

  Rhoda had little time to congratulate herself over her own tact, because the next afternoon Claire was not there when she needed her. Rhoda awoke from her afternoon nap with a violent pain under her rib cage. She twisted in her bed in an attempt to get away from it. She felt that she was being attacked: who was it that had his liver eaten out by eagles? She thought that if she lay still this thing would roll off of her, and in fact when she forced herself to lie flat, with her arms stiff at her sides—the corpse position—the pain ceased, quieted to something bearable, as though the attacker had left her for dead, or, like a snake, preferred only live food. But when she rose to reach for the phone, a second spasm passed over her. Her strongest thought was that the doctor must come at once to fix it.

  She propped herself on the pillows very slowly and gingerly and began to dial Information for the doctor’s number. Her voice sounded so startlingly normal she was afraid the doctor would fail to believe her; perhaps, after all, it was over now. But the after-image, a dent of pain in her upper abdomen, remained in urgency.

  The doctor was not in his office, but the nurse would try to reach him. How bad was it? Did she want an ambulance? “Don’t bother,” Rhoda said, “I’m sure there’s nothing they can do,” and she settled back into her pain like a diver re-descending; there was some relief in not having to try to speak. She was already so tired from resisting that she abandoned herself to writhing and moaning softly—but when the pain increased, she opened her eyes and tried to straighten her body once again.

  It had ebbed by the time Dr. Snyder arrived. She was running a raging temperature (something she had hardly noticed before) and she was wet and shivering. Suzanne, who was home by this time, showed the doctor upstairs; she assumed it was one of his routine visits, and was faintly surprised by his gravity when he asked her to leave the room. He put his hands on Rhoda’s tender spots, pressing and testing, and Rhoda submitted to the calming effect of the cool, deliberate feel of his palms.

  As she had suspected, there was very little he could do. The fever indicated infection—her bile ducts had learned on their own how to clog and infect themselves; he prescribed antibiotics. She would probably feel as she did now for several days, perhaps as long as a week, but the attack itself (he, too, called it an attack) was over. “Eat lightly, lots of little meals throughout the day,” he said. “Get the kids to wait on you.”

  By the end of the week Rhoda could get about by herself, but she tired quickly and her general recovery was slow. She kept to her bed a good part of the time, and she began to establish a pattern of receiving afternoon visits from friends.

  “I’ve taken a detour on the road to recovery,” she told Annie Marantz, who came by one day after lunch.

  “The road to recovery,” Annie said. “Wasn’t that a movie starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope?”

  “Tell me something cheerful,” Rhoda said. Callers had a tendency to tell her gruesome stories—descriptions of other people’s operations; Hinda’s mother was a notable offender in this.

  “I happen to have good news,” Annie said. “Don’t fall over or anything—obviously you can’t fall over, you’re already lying down—my oldest is getting married.”

  “Victor?” Rhoda said. “He’s only twenty, I thought. He’s still in college. What is he, a sophomore?”

  “A junior. He says he figures they’ve got housing for married students, he might as well go live in it. He’s got a point.”

  Rhoda turned her face to the wall. Sometimes Annie’s willful heartiness was a bit hard to take; it was a form of detachment—it was also a form of stupidity. As though marriage were some sort of simple task, and either you could or you couldn’t. For herself, Rhoda felt she couldn’t any more. It had become beyond her ken—unfamiliar: a common privilege whose denial she was resigned to, like her restrictions in diet.

  The realization that her health would never fully return made marriage even more remote to Rhoda. She was ineligible. It called to mind some sort of peasant fable, the prospective husband appraising a girl’s constitution, checking her teeth for soundness like a horse’s. You could expect a man to stand by in sickness and in health after a marriage, but not to willingly contract for a faulty helpmate. A patient cannot be a bride, Rhoda thought, Elizabeth Barrett Browning notwithstanding.

  “You don’t like the idea, don’t send a wedding present,” Annie said. “I’m not sensitive. But they’re serious about it.”

  “I should think so,” Rhoda said. “Marriage is serious. Even for fully grown adults.” It seemed perfectly clear to Rhoda, even as she said this, that most people went on being shallow and clownish regardless of how serious their circumstances.

  “I’ll send a present, don’t worry,” Rhoda said. “Who am I to be a killjoy?”

  Annie stayed another hour at least, prattling on about what a sweet girl Victor’s girl was. She was there later when Hinda arrived. Hinda let herself in, walking through the open front door and calling up, “Yoo hoo, is anybody home?” It was a few minutes before Hinda joined them upstairs, and when she walked into the bedroom she was carrying a teapot, holding it cautiously by the handle with a potholder. “Hot stuff,” she said. “The tea, not me.” Behind her
Claire walked, bearing a tray with the rest of the tea things on it. Claire was very careful to offer refreshment when there were guests.

  “If I had visitors all the time, I’d get fed non-stop,” Rhoda said. “Set it down over here on the bench.”

  “But she’s a good girl,” Hinda said. “Look at how she cut the pound cake in little slices on the plates.”

  “She’s very good, a good nurse,” Rhoda said. “When I get better, she’ll disappear again.”

  Rhoda’s strength built again slowly as spring approached, and, true to Rhoda’s prediction, Claire went back to spending time away from the house. Once, from the living room window, Rhoda saw Richie Scazzi’s car stop in front of the house, and Claire got out; Rhoda was surprised to see Suzanne get out after her. The two girls waved as the car pulled out, and then walked silently up the path together.

  So that was it: they had been arriving home at the same time lately. What an odd trio they made—Rhoda could hardly believe Suzanne voluntarily kept company with her younger sister. She had been slightly nicer to Claire around the house lately. It was funny Suzanne wasn’t jealous—but then Suzanne never really was jealous. She was possessive about her belongings, but she wasn’t greedy for people’s affections.

  Probably Suzanne had decided Richie Scazzi wasn’t all that great. She had been making slighting remarks lately about how he’d changed. Rhoda could see, even from her window, that Richie had in fact changed his style. He had gotten his hair trimmed—nothing so regular as a crewcut, but at least it was brushed back without the pompadour—and he wore a suit, cut tight in the trousers, with a narrow silver belt.