Silver

by Hilma Wolitzer

  The apartment was small. Lilliputians might have lived there quite graciously. Footsteps, voices, even the resonance of thoughts, it seemed, clamored through those thin walls. It was hard to think in positive terms, of coziness and economy. But of course we took it. We pressed money and gratitude into the hands of our benefactor and certain designated middlemen. One of them was the superintendent of our building. He opened the door of his apartment slightly and then wedged himself in the opening, as if he believed we might force entry. When we introduced ourselves, he smirked, giving the impression he knew plenty about us already.

  We were married in traditional June, as it turned out, all arrangements made in a desperate frenzy. There were some last-ditch attempts by others to foil our plans. Howard’s father, who directed funerals in Rego Park, tried to convince me to call off the whole thing. Behind Howard’s back he offered two hundred dollars and a side trip to the Virgin Islands. He was such a literal man. Did he think I might be restored to my former state there? A man in his business, I thought, should have been uplifted by the promise of new life, no matter what the circumstances.

  An hour before the wedding, my mother, who had been bitterly silent all morning, said, “You had promise, Paulette. Teachers always said good things about you. With a little luck, you could have been somebody.”

  But I knew she was remembering her own dreams for me, those tap dancing classes, those elocution lessons, that futile but desperate desire to have mothered Shirley Temple instead of me. I felt sorry for her then and I stroked her arm in consolation. But she wasn’t finished. “You used to write nice poems,” she said.

  I was startled. She had hardly ever acknowledged my poems before. “Oh, Ma,” I said. “That was kid stuff. Adolescent mewling.”

  Which wasn’t entirely true. I had intended to be a poet at one time, could be one yet, for all I knew. I still kept copies of my best poems and all the rejection slips from The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Partisan Review. They were standard rejection slips, not one with a personal note of encouragement or regret. I remember that I licked the first one to see if the signature was machine printed too, but the blue ink came off on my tongue. Sometimes I looked at the mastheads of those magazines for the names of the people who signed the slips, but they were never there.

  “Say something nice to me now,” I told my mother, fussing with the corsage that drooped tearoses on her breast. “It’s my wedding day.”

  “Well, I guess you know what you’re doing,” she said. It was the best she could come up with under the circumstances. But at least she was calmer than she and my father had been when I first offered my news. A musician! They clapped their foreheads and beat their breasts. How to explain that his music was an essential part of Howard, a second voice full of yearning and declaration; that his saxophone was a golden extension of his body? Musicians were confused in their heads with gypsies and dope peddlers, with vagabonds and thieves. But weren’t they right in a way? Didn’t he look wicked with his dark, sleepy eyes, and that mobster’s bulge in his trousers? Hadn’t he come in a caravan disguised as a ’52 Chevy, to steal me away?

  “It’s a bum’s life,” my father said. “It’s not steady.”

  My father had worked for twenty-eight years in the Post Office, and he could respect only the pension-bound promise of a government job. In the thirties, he pointed out, civil-service employees still put bread on their families’ tables and kept the nation running besides.

  “But Howard is going to have a studio,” I pointed out. “It will be a business. He’ll rent time to other musicians who want to make recordings, and he’ll give lessons on the saxophone and clarinet. And he’s part of a nice little combo. They play club dates and weddings. Strictly union scale,” I added, trying to speak my father’s language. But it was all a threat to them: Howard’s history, his handsomeness. Why hadn’t he gone in with his father? Unpleasant work maybe, but definitely steady.

  “He’s an artist,” I explained. “A sensitive man.”

  “A married man,” my mother said.

  “Divorced,” I said, correcting her. “Annulled,” I said, correcting myself. “They were hardly even married. It was only a little mistake.”

  Mistake! It was as trivial to them as my being only a little pregnant. Their X-ray eyes glanced in the direction of the real mistake, that furled fetus suspended below my heart.

  Howard’s married sister in Los Angeles sent a telegram: Every happiness, STOP. Wish we were there. STOP. Hope it’s a bed of roses. STOP.

  Howard assured me it was meant in ironic good humor, but he didn’t even sound convinced himself.

  No one cried at the ceremony. It was a small uneasy assemblage, but at least Howard’s first wife didn’t show up, as he had hinted she might.

  My oldest friend Judy Miller and her husband stood up for us. Sherry interrupted her wild life in Greenwich Village to serve as another witness. Two musicians from Howard’s combo wore dark glasses and drummed out nervous little melodies with their fingers on their folding chairs. They called everyone “man” regardless of gender, My mother wondered if they were blind. She wondered if they took opium.

  Howard had a minor nosebleed, delaying things for a few minutes. But then it was done. Quickly, without pageantry, without epithalamiums.

  A modest luncheon followed. The maraschino cherries oozed artificial color over the fruit cup. Lenny drank too much and told ethnic jokes and jokes about wedding nights, managing to offend everyone.

  Howard and I moved into the apartment right after the wedding. On the first night, lamps without shades threw our crazy, shadows everywhere. We turned off the lamps and went to bed. The windows were curtainless and filled with moonlight and the place smelled of new paint and insecticide. Above our heads strangers shouted and ran heavily across the floors.

  This is our new life, I thought. So far, so good. The ghosts of the former tenants had left, were gone forever with their unresolved quarrels, their rumbles of discontent. I shut my eyes and tried to memorize the room and the placement of furniture. My hand and Howard’s crept toward union under the bedclothes. Everything that mattered seemed to be held in that joining. But was my grip stronger, more urgent than his?

  My eyes opened and I looked at Howard lying next to me. I imagined him a fugitive from my will and determination, even from my love. His spirit moved without shadow across the unbroken paint of the walls. Away. Away.

  And what if I could never write again after this? Fabled punishment for happiness; one pleasure in exchange for another. But what if all creative thought went into clothes-washing and cake-making and just keeping Howard there; if the baby lying mute and waiting absorbed everything, my language along with my calcium?

  I gasped, struck with a kind of terrified joy. Howard mistook it for a cry of lust, and he moved over me. And when we finally moved together, thoughts, with the powdery substance of dreams, invaded me. This was the stuff then, this was the real thing: these arms, legs, flesh, these odors, gestures, this room, bed. Here were the poems, the unwritten words waiting coiled and crouched like loyal and patient beasts.

  “Here it is,” I told Howard, and I gave myself up.

  3

  Being born is something

  like showing up without

  cash in a small town.

  Try pretending vagrancy

  is only innocence.

  Learn the local lingo

  in a crash course,

  and make one good friend.

  PAULETTE F., January 5, 1958

  I PLANNED TO GO on a diet right after the baby was born. In the meantime I was growing, becoming bigger than life. I might have been a stand-in for the Russian Women’s Decathlon champ—a thing of beauty and power.

  Howard assured me that he loved me this way, statuesque, he called it, a word borrowed from false novels. He claimed that I was the first woman he could really sleep with, in the literal sense of the word. Renee, his first wife, had been scrawny and pale, poor thin
g. The knobs of her hips and elbows had poked him abruptly from dreams, reminding him of the skeletal frame underneath.

  “Everyone is big nowadays,” my mother said, her hands and feet like tiny blunt instruments.

  “Ah, beautiful,” Howard murmured, in the sleepy voice of sex, as he burrowed in.

  But I’m nobody’s fool. On Sundays I saw him look through the magazine section of The Times and pause with wistful concentration at those slender models in the brassiere ads. There is desire beyond mere lust in that, I thought. He might have looked at girls in centerfolds instead, at the opulent ones, who were there to inspire a different and simpler kind of longing.

  If, in his secret heart, he wanted me to be slim and trim, I would be. The women’s magazines were full of easy formulas I could follow: the thinking woman’s diet, the drinking woman’s diet, the shrinking woman’s diet. It would be a cinch.

  But there had always been more to me than meets the eye, more than can be seen on the wide screen. More than those breasts weighting their hammock or the frizzy-haired head ducking in doorways. Underneath there was a domestic heart with the modest beat of a ladies’ wristwatch. And inside my bulk, the future me stepped daintily, waiting for release.

  The baby grew too, floated in its confinement, pulsed and sounded its limits.

  And Howard was madly in love with it. It was a romance he had never experienced before. He had been married once and of course he had always had women. They would have followed him from Hamelin without even a note. They still sought him out. I watched, narrow-eyed, as new ones came up, threatened and disappeared. Howard was inviolate, he was a family man now. When he embraced me, he said, “I feel as if I’m embracing the world.”

  Confident, a veritable monument to his new life, I stretched and sighed in his arms. “I’m going to diet when this is all over. Become très chic.”

  “No,” he protested. “Don’t.”

  I did a little pirouette. “This stuff is going to fall off like snakeskins.”

  “Don’t lose my favorite parts,” Howard warned.

  We went to visit other couples who nested in their apartments. Judy and Lenny Miller had a little girl named Roberta. Her toys were always in evidence; a vaporizer was her constant bedside companion.

  Howard and I tiptoed in to admire her. When she was awake she was a fresh kid, the kind who screams whenever she speaks, and who answers civil, friendly questions with “No, silly,” or “No, stupid,” a miserable kid who makes nose-picking a public pleasure.

  But now the steam curled her hair into heartbreaking tendrils. The hiss of the vaporizer and the sweet rush of breath. We whispered in this shrine, made reverent by the miracle.

  When we tiptoed back to the living room, I thought: Howard doesn’t even feel trapped. He actually wants a baby, wants this whole homely scene for his own. And I hadn’t really trapped him anyway, had I? Isn’t the sperm the true aggressor, those little Weissmullers breaststroking to their destiny? Or is it the egg after all, waiting in ambush, ready to grab the first innocent stray? “Who really did this?” I once asked Howard. But he thought it was a theological poser. “God, I suppose, if you believe in Him,” he said. “Or else the life-force of nature.”

  We sat in the Millers’ living room among the debris and leavings of playtime. Howard rested a proprietary hand on my belly. All conversation came back to the inevitable subject.

  “My doctor said he never saw anything like it,” Judy said. “He had real tears in his eyes when he held Roberta up.”

  It might have been sweat, I thought. Judy tended to idealize things.

  She was talking about the natural childbirth course they had taken, where she had learned to breathe the right way during labor, so that she was able to be an active member of the delivery team.

  Lenny had been there too. Now he picked up a baby shoe and allowed us to observe the wonder of its size in the width of his palm. “It was a beautiful experience,” he said. “Most of the time we’re working against nature in the births of our children. It’s hypocrisy to keep the father outside, a stranger at the gates, so to speak.”

  What a metaphor! Lenny, who was a teacher in the city school system, was a pushover for any innovation in education. I imagined him whispering tips to his unborn daughter on the phonic method of reading.

  Now he advised Howard not to be that notorious slacker, the biological father who drops his seed and runs. Lenny had been right there, rubbing Judy’s back, speaking encouragement, talking and stroking his child into the world. I could sense Howard’s excitement.

  Then Judy brought out the photographs. We had seen them before, of course, but it seemed particularly appropriate to see them once again. Lenny was careful to hand them to us in proper chronological sequence. Judy, huge, horizontal on the delivery table. Himself, the masked robber of innocence, smiling at her with his eyes. The doctor, glistening with sweat/tears, his hand upward and lost to view. Oh, God, what was I doing? The evidence was all there. Judy, grimacing, clenching, contracting, her every expression reflected in the other faces.

  “See,” Lenny pointed out. “I was in labor, too.” Then, “Here she comes!” handing us the one with the emerging head, a small, bloodied, determined ball. Judy’s own head was lifted in an effort to watch, and she was smiling.

  Then, triumph! The whole family united at last on this shore. Mortal, tender, exquisite.

  They were winning photos, there was no denying that. Howard was speechless with emotion.

  “I thought I was dying, that’s all,” my mother said. “You were ripping me to shreds.”

  My father left the room.

  “He can’t stand to hear about it,” my mother whispered. “They feel guilty, you know.”

  “Howard and I are taking a course,” I said.

  “A course! What are they going to teach you—how to scream? You were feet first,” she said accusingly.

  But I wasn’t put off by her. She had lied about everything else most of my life. “God helps those who help themselves,” she used to say. And, “All cats are gray in the dark.” That, about lovemaking!

  Howard and I went to school where I learned to breathe. We saw films on the development of the embryo and the benefits of nursing. I could picture that small silvery fish already endowed with my genes and Howard’s, already bound to us by far more than the nourishing cord. I continued to grow, stretching my skin to translucency, to a new iridescent glow. Howard fed me tidbits from his plate to support my image and keep up my strength, and I took a vitamin supplement that came in little pink and blue capsules.

  I learned to pant, little doglike huffs and puffs for the last stages of labor. I practiced smiling into the bathroom mirror while I panted, in imitation of Judy’s Madonna smile of the last photograph. She had looked radiant, more beautiful even than in her wedding pictures.

  We had decided against delivery photographs for ourselves. Everything would be recorded perfectly in the darkroom of the heart.

  Howard and I cherished our new vocabulary. Term. I was carrying to full term. Dilation. Presentation. Lactation. Gorgeous words from a superior language.

  Our lovemaking took on the excitement of imposed restraint. “Are you all right?” Howard would ask. What a paradox!—to be so powerful and fragile at once.

  We played with names for the baby, from the biblical to the historical to the mythical. Nothing seemed good enough or suitably original.

  We waited. I went for monthly checkups. Other pregnant women in the doctor’s waiting room and I smiled knowingly at one another. We found ourselves united in a vast and ancient sorority without the rituals of pledging. Reducing us to girlish dependence, Dr. Marvin Kramer called us by our first names. We called him Dr. Kramer.

  Opening my legs on the examining table while his cheerless nurse laid a sheet across my knees for the sake of discretion, I could just make out the blond crown of his head, halo-lit by his miner’s lamp. But I could hear his voice as it tunneled through me. “You’re coming
along fine, Paulette. Good girl, good girl.”

  “Well, if you can’t be good, be careful.” That wasn’t one of my mother’s chestnuts, though it could have been. But I had been carried away, lost forever to common sense and practical advice. In the back seat of a car, so many destinies irrevocably set. It was astonishing.

  “I can hardly move anymore,” I complained to Howard one day. He crawled to a corner of the bed and folded himself to give me the most possible room.

  The gestation of an elephant is almost two years. Mindless hamsters pop out in sixteen days.

  “It will be over soon, love,” Howard said, and he reached across the bed and touched my hair.

  Then what? I wondered. Was that when my magic would lose its potency?

  “Do the breathing,” Howard suggested.

  “Take gas when the time comes,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t lead you astray.”

  Judy and Lenny came to visit with Roberta, who whined and tap-danced on our coffee table.

  “I’m going on five hundred calories a day,” I said, “as soon as I drop this load.”

  “Try to sound more maternal,” Howard whispered.

  “Short skirts are coming back,” I said in a threatening voice. “And those skimpy little blouses.”

  “Oh, just breathe,” he begged.

  “I’m sick of breathing,” I said.

  Labor began in the afternoon. It was a dispirited Sunday and we were listening to a melancholy Ethical Culture sermon on the radio.

  The elevator stopped five times for other passengers on our way down to the lobby of our building. Neighbors smiled at us and looked away, pretending they didn’t know where we were going with my swollen belly and little overnight case. Inside their pockets they counted on their fingers and were satisfied.

  When we came to the hospital, Howard immediately notified the admitting secretary that he was a Participating Father, and that he was going up with me.

  She laughed out loud and continued to type information on the insurance forms.