Household Words

by Joan Silber

  Suzanne was plucking her piece of cake from the toaster. “They’re oblivious on purpose,” Suzanne said. “And they’re always at it, they never stop.”

  “It’s true, those women could drive you nuts,” Rhoda said. Suzanne had been referring to what she considered their habitual treachery, but what Rhoda really minded was the way they besieged her with trivia: some of them could go on for hours about what articles they’d had dry-cleaned. (There were of course exceptions—Harriet and Hinda and others—people even the girls liked.)

  It was the first indication she’d had that Suzanne differentiated her from the horde of middle-aged matrons she spoke of so scornfully, and thought of her as suited for higher company. It drove Rhoda to a kind of frenzy trying to think who else she might have peopled her life with, but no nobler figures rose to her mind, nor could she fully imagine, when pressed, what else exactly they might talk about. It drew her to a muddled, non-specific despair. You could lose your grip altogether trying to feel for what it was, this other shore that was more deeply real. All the same she was glad Suzanne regarded her as wasted on her surroundings.

  For a while after this incident, Rhoda began to think (as she did whenever Suzanne behaved well) that Suzanne was finally going to leave behind the disagreeable personality she had assumed since the onset of puberty, and emerge as an admirable and worthy adult. She had the stuff, as Annie would say: she was straightforward, rational—formidable in her own way; she could well become the sort of woman who was highly respected, if only she would make herself more affable.

  But she still lashed out in occasional venomous attacks on Rhoda—calling her a hypocrite and a nag—and she was going to be allowed to graduate in June largely because the school couldn’t think what else to do with her. In April she was accepted at a women’s junior college in Florida, and Rhoda had hopes that she might begin to mature properly once she was away from home. Suzanne said very little about the whole thing. She was not excited—but then nobody thought she should be; it was a crummy little school—full of sappy Southern girls dressed to the nines—Suzanne had made fun of the place when they’d visited.

  In June Suzanne announced that she was not going to her own commencement, she thought the whole thing was a farce. “Don’t be so idealistic,” Rhoda said. “I waited a long time for this. Of course you’re going.” And the next day Suzanne came home with the white robe that she was to wear; Rhoda pinned up the hem for her. “Turn,” Rhoda said, fierce because she was gritting her teeth to keep the pins between her lips. Claire helped judge the length as Suzanne held out her arms and pivoted in place.

  Later, when her mouth was pinless and more benign again, Rhoda said, “I can’t wait to see our Suzy on the stage Thursday night.”

  “Balderdash and poppycock,” Suzanne said, but she sounded jolly enough.

  On Thursday night Rhoda sat with Claire and the other parents and waited while some hundred-odd students whose names began before T walked, one by one, from the football field to the jerry-built podium to receive their diplomas, until Suzanne was called. Rhoda, who had expected to feel primarily a rush of relief, was surprised at the wave of sentimentality which came over her. Suzanne was shaking hands with the president of the Board of Education, then she was walking back across the grass to her place. Rhoda was touched, caught off guard at the poignant normality of it all. Suzanne H. Taber was a quantitative phrase in a list, not substantially different from anyone else’s name, and Suzanne, back in line, was indistinguishable from the other figures in white.

  Afterwards Rhoda mingled with the other parents, and beamed congratulations at those she recognized. Even after her illnesses, she was still in better shape, handsomer and more well-turned-out, than some of the mothers (non-Jewish women didn’t age well, Rhoda thought). When she saw Natalie’s mother she said, “Well, they got through it all right, didn’t they?” and then she was surprised when the woman took her hand and held it with great feeling.

  The next day Suzanne was gone from the house all day—Rhoda assumed she was off celebrating with Natalie or someone, which was only fitting—and when she didn’t show up for dinner, Rhoda was annoyed but not worried. At eleven in the evening the phone rang and it was Suzanne. “Hello there, girl graduate,” Rhoda said.

  “I’m not coming home,” Suzanne said.

  At first Rhoda thought she meant she was staying overnight at a girlfriend’s house—and then the fear flashed through her that Suzanne was spending the night with a boy and was for some reason calling home to announce it. “Where are you?” she said.

  Suzanne said that she was somewhere “down the shore,” she was not about to tell where, she would rather not say when she was coming home, maybe never. She didn’t sound drunk, she sounded dry and cryptic.

  Rhoda was speaking in a low tone full of menace—she was trying not to say things that would make her sound like a nag or a hypocrite—over and over in various ways she was saying, “You’ll be sorry,” and “There’s something wrong with you,” and “Haven’t I had enough?” and “This is crazy.” She mentioned the police.

  “They’ll laugh at you,” Suzanne said. “I’m hanging up now.”

  Through the night Rhoda lay awake forming angry speeches to Suzanne. She wondered if Suzanne was sleeping on the beach. She would get through the night with nothing worse than a few sand-fly bites, as long as she stayed away from the penny arcades, which could get rough at night. Suzanne was natively wary, and as long as Rhoda stayed angry with her, it was hard to think of her as a victim. She would have to come home, that was one thing: at heart she was a nervous, dumbstruck creature, not brash enough to go it alone.

  The next day when Suzanne did not return, Rhoda first called all the other mothers who might know of Suzanne’s whereabouts—none of them knew, and most were alarmed in a scornful way—and then she called the police. The police were sympathetic but not helpful; Suzanne was over age, and it was too early to file a Missing Persons report. “Lots of times they get all worked up after graduation,” the officer said. “Mostly they come back right away. You sure you don’t know the boyfriend’s name?” It dawned on Rhoda what the officer meant by “all worked up.” Rhoda knew that he was wrong because you were never right about Suzanne if you supposed explicable common behavior.

  All afternoon Rhoda raged over the phone with friends (which gave a counter-irritating relief), until Claire “remembered” with a phony faltering uncertainty that one of the older Scazzi sisters was married to somebody who lived near Asbury Park. Claire didn’t know the married name and nobody was home at the Scazzis’ house in town.

  At nightfall, Suzanne walked through the front door and into the living room; she said, “Hel lo,” smiling in a foolish, guilty way, and began walking up the stairs. Rhoda called after her, but she would not say what she had done or how she had gotten home, whether by bus or by car. Her face was red from the sun. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said.

  Rhoda stood outside her door and said loudly, “I feel like giving you what-for, but you’re too big to hit.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Suzanne said. “I’m asleep now, I can’t hear you.”

  “Our mighty wanderer has returned,” Rhoda told Hinda over the phone. “Back home with her tail between her legs. Who invented the idea of teenagers anyway?”

  “But you were so frightened,” Hinda said. “You do bounce back quickly.”

  “Life’s too short for this aggravation,” Rhoda said. “I’m ready to give her back to the Indians at this point.”

  She could hear the childish bravado in this, but she assumed that if she yielded now to any milder feelings, she would become someone pathetic and she would slip into dreadful wallflowerish longings for the privileges of everybody else’s life.

  All that summer Suzanne moped sullenly around the house, sleeping through the days. In September she permitted herself to be packed off to college, and Rhoda saw her actually board the plane. She wrote them one note, telling about her classes. Sh
e seemed to be all right, but it was hard to tell. Rhoda took to phoning every week; by November, she had thinned it to twice a month, on Suzanne’s request. “You could call yourself once in a while to find out how I am,” Rhoda said.

  “How are you?” Suzanne said.

  “Better,” Rhoda said.

  She actually was finding herself progressively weaker. At times she felt like a nineteenth-century consumptive, resting, always resting, in her room. She had her vials of pills, antibiotics, painkillers, fat-digesters, to be taken before meals, after meals, 2x daily, 3x daily, in case of nausea, as needed. The pills didn’t seem to help, but she was afraid not to take them. She told Suzanne, “Not that it matters to you, but I have the doctors to thank for keeping me alive.”

  Claire helped some. She would stay home with Rhoda in the evenings, when asked. Boys sometimes came to visit her while she sat vigil. From her bedroom upstairs Rhoda could hear them talking and giggling in the living room below. When the silences got too long, Rhoda would call downstairs to have something brought to her.

  Claire would come up the stairs then, red in the cheeks and not wanting to look Rhoda in the eye. It made Rhoda remember the summer just after Leonard’s death, when she had walked the boardwalk, seeing people, thinking, Why is the whole world in couples? It had seemed to her at the time an obtuseness on the part of the world. Everyone cared for the person at hand, the person handy, and her sorrow was an eyesore, an exception to the rules, in which they were not much interested (you could hardly blame them), an example of a higher reality of which they would rather not think. She wanted Claire to think.

  Of course it behooved her, as the mother, to be vigilant of her daughter, to shoo the boys out before midnight in a good-natured way. She saw no reason to trust to Claire’s judgment in these matters. She was too apt to be “easy” for someone else to control. Rhoda heard her laughing like a hyena at boys’ witless jokes, she heard her voice bobbing for their attention.

  Sometimes she thought, Suzanne doesn’t care about pleasing anyone, and Claire wants to please everybody. Still, Claire was all right. Around Easter time she brought home a bag of jellybeans and scattered them around the house in little glass dishes. “They’re for you,” she said. “They don’t have any fat in them, they’re mostly just sugar. I thought you might like them as a treat.”

  “They’re not bad,” Rhoda said. “Except for the black ones, I haven’t had them in years.” She was growing gluttonous about small pleasures.

  Claire had bought the candies on one of her many trips to New York, and the potted hyacinth she brought home with them reminded Rhoda that it was spring, and had been for a while, and as long as she was feeling stronger she might go out for an airing. She put on a light jacket and walked down the block a bit, feeling slightly weak-kneed; the ground seemed to be spongy and soft-edged. In the years that Rhoda had lived on the block, the street had changed only slightly; someone had built a ranch-style split-level on the corner lot, and aluminum screen doors had become popular, tinny and flimsy in the arched or pillared doorways. Rhoda waved to Sally Finch, who was on her hands and knees digging around the azaleas in her front yard. “Look who’s out,” Sally said. “Come on over and sit on the porch awhile.”

  Sally’s looks didn’t change from year to year, Rhoda thought, crossing the street. It was because she dyed her hair such a violent red color that you could never remember her other features well enough to judge if they’d aged. Her hands were freckled; Rhoda couldn’t decide whether this made them look girlish or old. “Don’t look at my fingernails,” Sally said. “They’re all full of dirt. That’s the better chair, the nylon web one. You look a lot better, Rhoda. How’s everyone else? How’s your father? He was always such a nice old gentleman.”

  “I haven’t been well enough to visit him lately,” Rhoda said. “I send him packages sometimes. He’s in a different home now, not a country club like the last one, I’m sorry to say. His health is really not too bad, all things considered, but his memory’s going. He thinks FDR’s still President.”

  “I wish he was,” Sally said.

  “He says the same things he always said, only they’re not connected to anything. He says, Go without me, I’ll wait, and You think you know everything, Gittel. Gittel was my mother’s name.”

  “At least, even when nothing’s happening, he still has the same opinions,” Sally smiled.

  “Consistency is a strong point in our family, it’s true,” Rhoda said. “But it gets grotesque at this stage—he just insists on giving the same answer no matter what you ask him. My sister-in-law thinks it’s very brave of him.”

  “They don’t get better in those homes,” Sally said.

  “Sometimes I come in and he tells me how wonderful it is there, the food is wonderful, the attendants are wonderful. Then if I agree he argues with me.”

  “You want some lemonade?” Sally said.

  “No, thanks, don’t bother,” Rhoda said. “I’m about to head for home any minute.” Then, as she crossed the street, it occurred to her that she had really wanted that glass of lemonade, that cold drinks were nice, taken outside, and that Sally was a good neighbor, but what she wanted most intensely was to lie down.

  The next day Rhoda woke with pain. She made her way downstairs for breakfast; it was Saturday and Claire still sat at the table, eating Rice Krispies and reading Life magazine. Rhoda was walking stooped over. “Are you all right?” Claire said.

  “I think I ate too many jellybeans,” Rhoda said.

  Rhoda was sidling into the chair, arranging her body-weight with great care; when she looked up across the table she realized Claire was laughing. She was on the inward breath, then she let the air out and burst into giggles. “Jellybeans,” Claire said, gasping. “Wasn’t that immature of you—hee hee—to let yourself go wild over jellybeans?”

  “Oh, it isn’t all that funny,” Rhoda said. Claire always found it humorous when her mother did anything the slightest bit off the usual or out of character. She had laughed herself silly once when Rhoda had come from the store having bought herself (admittedly a mistake) a pair of black toreador pants and a leopardskin print pullover. Even afterwards Rhoda could never wear that outfit without Claire’s going off into fits of laughter.

  “Control your hilarity,” Rhoda said, “enough to make me a cup of tea without scalding yourself. It’s an effort for me just to sit here. Everything hurts me.”

  Later, sitting up in bed, listening to a talk show on the radio, Rhoda felt freshly vexed at the relentlessness of her troubles. Moe Seidman used to have a sign in his office: THEY TOLD ME, CHEER UP THINGS COULD BE WORSE—SO I CHEERED UP, AND SURE ENOUGH, THINGS GOT WORSE. The recollection of this tickled her. She could remember his office very clearly. What was odd about looking back was that she seemed to have been very young and robust then, whereas at the time she had seen herself as seasoned and weary.

  Old Soldiers, she and Moe used to call themselves, in a loose jaunty way (it was not long after MacArthur’s famous farewell speech and everybody was full of various witty paraphrases about how old whatevers didn’t die, they just did something-or-other). Moe had hated MacArthur, come to think of it. “A real jackass,” he had said. “I had a buddy in the army who had a theory about generals like him. They always stuck to their mistakes because they got to be generals from being such stiff-necks. The last thing they ever wanted to do was to change their minds on account of a little thing like facts. Heroes,” he had snorted.

  “Facing facts” had been a favorite phrase of Moe’s. Moe had always implied that a fact was a thing you could stare down, get a grip on, and wrestle to the floor, like an adversary or a demon. Suzanne had often accused Rhoda of being deliberately obtuse—“blind to the realities,” something like that—and Rhoda had been shocked, having always considered herself remarkably down-to-earth: but it occurred to her now that facts might well be something you’d let slip through your fingers, from a natural fastidiousness at touching them.

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nbsp; She was beginning to feel about her own body that it was something she would not have touched had it not belonged to her. It was scarred from her gall bladder operation years ago, pale and dimpled, with a paunch in the midriff. She was not a vain woman but the sight saddened her. To the best of her ability, she had taken care of herself, cleansed daily, gone for walks, and eaten sensibly, but her body had not kept its part of the bargain, had violated all rules and turned against her as an enemy.

  There was something particularly wrong with her middle section; lying in bed, she folded her hands across it as though they could smooth it or give calm; the bulge puffed out in an aberrant way; the distortion of it made her shudder.

  Dr. Snyder was not pleased either. Rhoda wished that doctors would learn to veil their dismay, to muffle their self-important murmurs of alarm. Of course she knew the healthy human body wasn’t supposed to look like this, anybody knew that, she hadn’t been shut up so long as to forget.

  Rhoda was shrugging at him for making such a fuss about things once he was called into the act, when she heard him say the word hospital. Rhoda remembered, from his care of her mother, how he chose to avoid hospitals (he had let them keep her mother at home, in the old way). “For tests,” he was saying.

  “Tests for what?” Rhoda said.

  He was so discreet in his answer that Rhoda realized her ailment had become too sophisticated for him and he only hoped someone else could figure it out. He spoke of the wonderful scientific care she was going to get, until Rhoda began to picture the hospital as a place where she could close her eyes and rest, as she rested here, only there she would be surrounded by such competence, such accuracy of diagnosis and prescription, that she would wake up well and refreshed. Instead of always half-well: she wondered, in fact, if idling with Dr. Snyder had kept her from a cure up till now.