Household Words

by Joan Silber

  In the daytime she sat on the side of Rhoda’s bed, ate with her, and talked. She wore her hair in a messy Bohemian top-knot, bristling with bobby pins and loose tendrils. She moved her hands when she spoke, a habit Rhoda had tried to break her of because it seemed too Jewish, but when Rhoda let her go on without stopping her, Claire tossed her head and spread her palms, her voice rose and fell as she spoke quickly, and she brought to the sickroom a rush of animation and charm, a quality of life.

  Leonard had once said, in the early days, long before the girls were born, that he liked all small children, even the worst of them, because they were such units of pure energy. “Energy is eternal delight,” he had said (he was reading Blake and Swedenborg around then). At the time she had dismissed this as the sort of soaring naïveté men were given to. But she leaned back on the pillows now and watched Claire—Rhoda was following the form of her rapid trilling speech more than she was actually listening to her (something about a friend’s attempts to teach her tennis: she was making it funny for Rhoda, pantomiming her mistakes with the racket)—and Rhoda sensed what Leonard must have felt in anticipation, a gratitude for the vibrancy quickening the air around her. Rhoda nodded, moving toward it out of her own torpor, and then she leaned back again and let the rippling monologue play out before her.

  Claire had a way of pinching her face in mimicry that reminded Rhoda of her mother, who had always thrown herself into telling a story. Claire was “political” now—she had a button on her shoulderbag which said SAY NO TO NUCLEAR TESTS (no, she was not backing Kennedy in the campaign; he was just a liberal)—and she had asked about her grandmother’s socialism: had she been a strict Marxist, or a reformist Social Democrat, or a Trotskyite? (Rhoda had no idea.) Claire wanted details, she wanted to find resemblances, traces of a spirit of advancement which, she implied quite strongly, had skipped a generation.

  Rhoda did find herself vaguely tickled at the thought of Claire’s taking up her grandmother’s “causes” (although it was odd, because of all things about her mother these seemed to Rhoda the most outdated). Of course it was not exactly flattering to have Claire think of her as the blank spot in the family lineage. Rhoda reminded Claire that her grandmother—intensely patriotic, like most immigrants—would not have been impressed that Claire no longer spoke the Pledge of Allegiance in school (although she stood when the other kids did). Still, Claire’s answer had actually sounded like something from one of Rhoda’s mother’s pamphlets. “I consider myself,” she said, “a citizen of the world.”

  Rhoda sometimes felt that she personally considered her own self just a citizen of 32 Chestnut Drive, which was of course not a bad place to locate yourself. Claire wanted to get away from all that—she had already made that very clear—she would go to almost any lengths to get out of where she came from; she regarded the trappings of her background as trivial embarrassments, she would have preferred not to be attached to any decade or period, she would have liked to be something abstract and romantic. She was fixing a stray lock of her hair, which was piled in a bun actually quite like the way her grandmother had worn hers, and in this gesture, with her arms raised, by the light of the half-shaded window, Rhoda saw her as she wanted to be seen, a figure outside of time, radiant and transcendent.

  She was fixing her hair because it was time to leave. She pulled her purse over her shoulder and leaned over to kiss Rhoda. The girl’s cheek was smooth and cool. Rhoda kissed her and said, as she used to when Claire was little, “Qui est jolie? Claire est jolie.”

  “Au revoir,” Claire said, saluting, as she left.

  “Well, I certainly know that was your daughter,” the nurse said, coming into the room afterwards. “Anybody can see that. She looks just like you, doesn’t she?”

  “Oh, boy,” Rhoda said, “don’t let her hear you say that,” and she cast her eyes up to the ceiling balefully, which did not hide the fact that she was pleased.

  Hinda must have sent out word, because the large-scale visits of friends began again. Rhoda could tell by their narrowed glances how God-awful she must look—she was losing weight, and her hair, which had thinned from the fevers, was pulled back with a ribbon (a childish, slightly demeaning style). Her voice was cracked and weak and she was too weary to follow conversations well, so that her remarks (intelligent enough in themselves) sometimes confused her listeners.

  She wrote to Claire at camp—“Sounds like you’re having a ball. Lotsa luck, with your ten-year-old terrors. Mobs of callers in and out here—I have to give them the bum’s rush or it gets to be too much for me. They are trying a new medication on me. Right now I look like death warmed-over, but I hope to be a medical wonder by the time you get home. Your ever-lovin’ MOM.”

  She had trouble focusing her eyes while she wrote. Twice in the next week she dozed off while people were sitting by her bed talking to her. A teacup fell out of her hand because she had to clench too hard to hold it; fortunately the tea was only tepid, but Maisie had to change the sheets, and while Rhoda waited in a chair, she fell asleep again. She was not asleep so much as in a netherworld which was less painful than keeping alert; she could hear her own labored breathing; Maisie was trying to guide her back to the bed, with great difficulty, and it occurred to Rhoda that she wanted to buzz for the nurse.

  The next day Rhoda could not get up at all, and when the doctor came, she listened to him suggesting admission to a different, fancier hospital outside the state, and she nodded. Specialists, he was referring her to specialists. A wonderful clinic in Boston, she would have to be flown there; a member of her family would of course accompany her.

  “My younger daughter can take me,” Rhoda said.

  She postponed trying to reach Claire at camp, thinking that by some fortunate coincidence Claire might call home herself (she did sometimes). Rhoda phoned twice the next day—once Claire was on a hike and once she was at the boys’ camp—but at dinnertime they fetched her from the mess hall. Claire was breathless when she got to the phone. “The doctors in Boston want to look at me,” Rhoda said. “My liver is so gorgeous the big guys want to ogle me.”

  “I thought you were better,” Claire said. “I thought you were through being sick all the time. I think someone else is going to have to take you. I have the lead in a play, and it’s this weekend. We’re doing Of Thee I Sing; it’s a musical about running for president.”

  “So you’ll be a movie star some other time.”

  “It’s hard to hear you,” Claire said. “Do you have laryngitis? Also there’s something else—Lonny Frankel has the part opposite me.”

  “Which means?”

  “You remember him, he used to come to the house and watch TV with me. We were going together again for the first part of the summer but then we broke up again. And if I can’t be in the play, people in this camp will think it’s because I’m still upset and I can’t handle it.”

  “Really, Claire, this is very petty. Tell Lonny to explain to people if you’re so worried. He’ll do it if he’s decent.”

  “I can’t do that.” Claire was beginning to cry. “You never liked him. You were always mean to him when he came to the house. You’re glad we broke up. I came home once already. It’s a four-hour trip. Nobody else has to go home all the time. Can’t Maisie take you? Why can’t Maisie take you?”

  “Maisie,” Rhoda said. “I wouldn’t be calling you if I wanted Maisie to take me. What is the matter with you? It’s an emergency. Don’t make me ask you this way.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll do it,” Claire said. “I’m coming home, it’s all right, I’m coming.”

  Claire arrived home a day later, and in person she was quite contrite and gentle. She sat at the edge of Rhoda’s bed and told stories about camp. She gave a long funny description of how a new girl had to be rehearsed for the part and how she kept muffing her cues and speaking her lines out of turn. “I felt like Pavlova trying to coax an underling into shaping up,” Claire said, stretching her arms out dramatically. “I was like a
n old pro retiring from the boards.”

  “You’re a good girl,” Rhoda said, and she saw Claire’s eyes suddenly shine with tears. Rhoda’s own eyes felt as though they were burning in their sockets, and she closed them for a minute, which gave some relief from a certain pressure of heat behind them, but she wanted to stay awake a while longer while Claire was there. She asked Claire to bring her a drink of water. “Your hands feel so cool,” she said, as Claire handed her the cup.

  Claire touched Rhoda’s forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m laying my soothing hands upon your feverish brow,” she said.

  “Well, it feels delicious, keep doing it,” Rhoda said. “Only in a minute, get me another nightgown. This one’s all wet and sweaty.”

  When Rhoda lifted her arms to slip off the old nightgown, she saw Claire staring at the protrusion from her middle. Rhoda had forgotten how pendulous and distorted it must look; because they had cut through muscle wall in the last operation, the swelling was free to sag like a pouch. “Pretty bad, isn’t it?” Rhoda said. Claire’s face was truly frightened.

  “Here’s one sleeve coming over,” Claire said. “Don’t make a fist, it won’t fit. Who designs your nightgowns, Little Bo-Peep’s dressmaker?”

  “It’s the goose, it’s Mother Goose I look like,” Rhoda said, buttoning the front, “with my scrawny neck and this little ruff. I do itch all the time, maybe I have feather mites.”

  “Get you some Hartz Mountain powder in the morning,” Claire said.

  “Cheep, cheep. Thank you,” Rhoda said.

  “Good night,” Claire said. “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  For much of the airplane ride Rhoda slept with her mouth open, so that the rattle of her own uvular breathing broke into her sleep, until she woke, finally, under the gaze of a very scared stewardess who was whispering to Claire, “Is she awake? Can we get her up now?” They slid her into a wheelchair—Claire had been very worried that the wheelchair wouldn’t be there to meet them, and Rhoda said, “See, I told you,” but it was too tiring to turn her neck to speak and she slumped against the leather padding, letting her head loll, while Claire steered her jerkily through the airport.

  She slept through the taxi ride, but at the end she pretended to be interested in the modern façade of the hospital. Very Bauhaus, Leonard would have liked it; she tried to explain this to Claire, but Claire nodded vacantly. It was a perfectly nice hospital, as far as Rhoda could tell. Her room was pink and green and streamlined. The sheets were still the cheap, scratchy kind. “I just want to sleep,” Rhoda said, but a nurse made her change out of her street clothes.

  “How long have you been this way?” the nurse wanted to know, as the blouse rose away from Rhoda’s distorted middle.

  “Don’t ask me now,” Rhoda said. She was tired of everyone’s panic at the sight of her. It was bad enough looking that way alone—now she had no decent privacy. She still felt—she always felt—that she was a normal woman with an attractive fate who was trapped in a mistake. She was waiting for the mistake to lift. “Can’t they draw the blinds?” she said, closing her eyes.

  When she opened them, a different woman stood before her. It was the dietician, who had been sent to interrogate her about food preferences before they would let her sleep.

  “She doesn’t like Jell-O,” Claire was saying. Claire was still there.

  “The odor from that woman’s mouth, did you notice?” Rhoda said. The dietician was going out the door.

  Claire frowned. “She can hear you.”

  “Of course, it’s not her fault, poor thing. Remember how in Italy they used to come right up to you and talk into your face? We got used to that all right, didn’t we? The Latin way.”

  “Well, it’s sort of a matter of opinion,” Claire said.

  “You weren’t with me in Italy, were you?” Rhoda said. “I forgot.”

  When Rhoda woke again, a spoon was being jabbed in front of her face. “Lean forward,” the nurse was saying.

  “I ate already,” Rhoda said. “I ate this morning. Everything hurts me. I’m not hungry.” She shook her head to get away from the spoon, and a sticky, bad-smelling liquid splashed onto the sheets.

  “It’s medicine,” the nurse said. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  “What will?” Rhoda said.

  “Just open up.”

  Rhoda’s back ached, and the effort to fit her mouth around the spoon seemed more than what should fairly be required of her. “Ugh,” she said. “It tastes awful.” She let her head sink back on the pillows. She was irritated that they hadn’t let her stay asleep. She hated waking up, now that she kept waking up worse.

  “I’ll get you a drink of water to take the taste away,” the nurse said. She was wiping Rhoda’s mouth.

  When she held out a paper cup with a straw for Rhoda to sip at, Rhoda found that it hurt her to swallow. “This is awful,” she said. “How did I get to be so sick?” She felt so disappointed. “No more water,” she said, turning her head.

  When she woke again, she was in a different room. It was a large, open room, slightly darkened, and near her was a hissing sound, like a fan or water boiling. Andy and Lainie were standing at the foot of her bed. “Why is everyone whispering?” Rhoda said.

  “You’re in intensive care,” Andy said. “You are getting the best possible care in the entire hospital.”

  She couldn’t move one arm, which was attached to the I.V., but she got the other out from under the covers and placed it in its natural spot over the pain in her middle. They had put a white tag on her wrist, and against it her hand was discolored, especially around the knuckles and veins, which looked smudged and bruised. The skin was the color of shadows under the eyes. “How did I get to be so black?” she said. She looked at her brother and his wife; she could see they didn’t know anything. “Where’s Claire?” she said.

  “They only let in two at a time,” Andy said. “I sent Claire down to go get some lunch. We can’t stay too long.”

  Rhoda asked if there was a mirror anywhere. “In the chest by the bed, sometimes they put one there.”

  “There isn’t one,” Lainie said.

  “I don’t want to look anyway,” she said. “I’m all black, aren’t I?” She was remembering how her mother had looked in her illness. “I can’t hear you. You’re mumbling.”

  “How are you feeling now?” Andy said.

  “I feel like I’m never going to get up again.”

  She could feel their shocked silence. She shouldn’t have said this—Andy seemed to be telling her so. She was whining—she had never been so physically miserable before and she wanted them to know it.

  She didn’t want to answer Andy. She was thinking of the way the kitchen in her house had looked with its original wallpaper; she had a strong memory of the smell of beef cooking; Leonard trying to chew the roast she had overcooked one night, and the both of them laughing. Bright-faced, sturdy, lucky people. And not fools. Cognizant of the small failures between them, the demands of the world they strained against; “realistic” people, willing to bear what was within the realm of the bearable. She had been waiting—with great forbearance, she had always thought—for the form of this life to return.

  She had done whatever there was to be done, she had always felt that quite clearly: she had known what to do, that was one thing. Now she saw that she had not known. She had made mistakes, especially with the children, precisely for whose sake she had guarded against the luxury of finding herself in error. It was all a muddle of misery now: she struggled to think what she might have done; she racked her brains and she was dizzy in her fevers, she whimpered.

  “I’m so tired and disgusted,” she said. She licked her lips, stretched her mouth, and winced with her whole face—it was a terrible flinching, a grimace of disgust at her own anguish.

  “It’s not like you to be discouraged,” Andy said. She sighed and closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to talk to them.

  Andy was offe
ring her some cracked ice; she moved her mouth away from him. She had to work to shift her head. She felt so heavy all the time now. Falling into naps, she sometimes felt herself sinking into the soft mattress and dreamed of being stifled in its creviced curves under the mound of sheets. She had become something denser, like a mineral, pulled down.

  Like a stone: she had awakened in the night and known what it was—it was the weight of her own stubbornness, her own unchanging shape. Resistant, almost crystalline in its fixity—events had worn her but they hadn’t altered her, so that she had had the hardest of lives, boring her way obdurately through circumstance.

  She kept dreaming about food. Foods she hadn’t been able to eat in years: chocolate truffles—of all things—she and Hinda had once finished a box between them. Totally heedless, they couldn’t have been more than fifteen at the time. She could remember very clearly biting into the centers and the lines your teeth made in them. Angelic foods. In Paris she and Ellie had bought for dessert a cheese that was like churned whipped cream. The craving was like a mystery in her sleep. Lying there, she had a sad, pleasant longing for these things, and the thought of them calmed her.

  When they came back later in the day, she had begun to pick at herself. With her eyes closed, she was plucking at her nightgown and at the blanket. She was squinting fretfully, pursing her lips and making smacking noises, as though she were alone, but she was aware that they were by her bedside, and she spoke as Claire leaned toward her. “What did you have to eat for lunch?” she said hoarsely.

  “A ham sandwich,” Claire said.

  “That’s not kosher,” Rhoda whispered.

  “Always with the jokes,” Andy said. “Keep it up. I’m going out for a few minutes now so someone else can come in. You have a surprise visitor waiting out here.”