by Abby Frucht
I kissed Phyllis good-bye and grabbed a handful of strawberries and left. For a while I sat in the car and waited for the rain to let up, chewing slowly to ward off my hunger. For days, I felt, I had been eating nothing else, like someone lost in a forest. I just wanted to get home. On the highway I took a wrong turn. They had to turn me around at a toll booth, stopping traffic so I could cut across the lanes.
Jack wasn’t home when I got there. He had been busy; the bed was stacked with laundry. The windows were open, and the floor was streaked with rain. It was the season of mildew, and I could smell it on the towel as I wiped the perspiration from my face. I was tired, too tired to undress. I fell among the fresh-washed clothes and slept.
Later that night, Jack came home. He smelled like soap. I have never asked him where he was and he has never told me. At the time I was too sick to care. My throat and tongue were parched, and my limbs ached dully. He helped me out of my clothes and fed me water and aspirin. He dampened a washcloth and held it briefly to my face, which he told me was swollen. My lips felt swollen and tasted of brine. I refused to eat. Jack brought me hot cups of broth, which cooled before I touched them.
“What could it be?” he said, on the second day, when I was feeling a little better. I was sitting up in bed, just sitting, still dazed, doing nothing.
“Strawberries,” I said. “Look at this rash. What else could it be?”
“Mmmm,” Jack said. He was brushing my hair, a lock at a time. His strokes were even and gentle. That was when we turned the television on, and Ronald Reagan said what he said, and Jack threw the brush and hit him in the face and broke it. It fell to the floor in two pieces. I don’t remember the rest of the news, if there was any. We just sat very close. I think I told him about the man in the Winnebago, just then remembering him. Then we both went to sleep. Ten years have gone by, and it is suddenly the season, and believe me when I say I haven’t touched another strawberry since.
Engagements
Jeffrey and I agreed four years ago that if we ever have a baby we’ll get married without a word, with no second thoughts and little ceremony, just a case of San Miguel Dark and a few hastily scribbled invitations. If we don’t make a big deal of it, we said, nobody else will. There will be no T-shirts printed with our names, no weeping, and not too many flowers. Of course I ponder, in private, as I am certain he must also, the question: why marry for the baby if not for ourselves? What difference could it make to a child? It is a troublesome question, fragile as crystal and as cold to the touch.
I’ve learned to be careful with questions. Joanne, for instance, who lived across the street from us before we moved and wears her white uniform even on off hours, thinks I am pushy or rude. Tactless. I know this because her husband, who used to smile whenever he saw me, no longer did. He no longer waved when I passed. He looked the other way or past me at the tops of trees or at my feet. I spoke to Joanne only twice. The first time, she was kneeling in her yard, prying weeds from between the bricks in their front walk. I thought she might like to know that her skirt was up around her hips but when she saw me coming she stood up and straightened it out and smiled, so instead I asked her what it was like to be a nurse. She said she wasn’t a nurse but a nurse’s aide, that the patients were senile and usually got her down, that she was tired of lugging bedpans and changing bibs, that the TVs blast incessantly but there are flowers everywhere. She seemed startled that I had asked and went on to explain, in detail, the callousness of the doctors. She said more often than not they don’t know what they’re doing, that they are heartless bastards, that people are always dying.
The next time I saw her I invited her over for a cup of tea. She is plump and cheerful and efficient; when I spilled the whole bowlful of sugar she whisked it away with a paper towel while I stood cursing. As soon as we were seated on the front porch, drinking our tea, I asked her why she got married. She shivered a bit and pulled an old pink sweater tighter around her, but this could have been the chill in the air. It was autumn. She said quite abruptly that she was in love with Richard. Richard is her husband.
“But why bother to get married?” I pressed. “What’s the point?”
“It’s not a bother. I’m proud to be his wife.”
We didn’t say much after that. I counted the leaves that fell as we sat there. Five leaves. She was staring across the street at her house, which was a large house for a childless couple.
“Are you going to have a family?” I asked.
“Of course. Of course we’re going to.”
She left when her glass was still half full.
Whenever I ask Jeffrey whether or not I am beautiful he compares my cheekbones to those of an Indian woman whose picture he has pasted to the refrigerator. She is a Sioux, standing in a wheat field, cradling a bundle of it in her arms. Her eyes are wide and wet-looking. Her face is pained. Her hair, which falls across her chest, is coiled like rope. My cheekbones, Jeffrey tells me, could very well be hers.
“But she looks like her IBM is plummeting,” I say unfairly. “What on earth do you see in her?”
“She’s suffering,” he says. “She’s lost her mate.” From this I understand that he thinks he knows everything about her, that he has imagined making love to her. When he talks this way he stares at the ceiling while one corner of his mouth twitches and turns up as if he is trying not to laugh. I don’t know if he takes himself seriously.
“But is she beautiful?”
“Come to think of it,” he says, “the shape of her face”—tracing the line from eye to chin with the eraser of his pencil—“the general effect. It could very well be yours.”
It’s like ordering tea in a restaurant and getting a little ceramic pot filled with steamy water and a teacup with a Lipton tea bag inside. You never get quite what you’re after.
Jeffrey is thirty-three. I am twenty-seven. He is a lawyer with a downtown firm, I am part-owner of the bookstore, and we have just moved into this house, this tall brick house which is a step up from anything else we’ve lived in because it has a fenced back yard and several small leaded windows, It was amazing luck, really, this house. We had gone for a drive in Jeffrey’s MG. It was the first real spring day: the forsythia suddenly blooming, the buds on the magnolias beginning to swell, the streets lined with joggers. Jeffrey had put on his driving cap, a jaunty tweed he inherited from his father and wears only on rare occasions, then he’d picked a sprig of forsythia and stuck it in my hair.
“There,” he said, stepping back to look at me. “We’re both suitably out of character.”
We drove around for an hour and then we saw the house. One of the two front doors was open and a man wearing white overalls was painting it scarlet to match the other. The windows, three on each side, are arranged symmetrically and have scarlet shutters. There is a chimney on either side and a neat row of ivy grows straight up the middle, dividing the whole house into two perfect halves.
“How tacky,” we both said.
On the front lawn was a sign which read FOR SALE and beneath that in smaller letters, OR RENT. We stopped. When the man saw us he put down the brush and wiped his face, leaving a smudge of paint the size of a strawberry. He said, “Pets and children welcome,” and showed us the house. It had arched doorways leading from one room to another, a set of steps which made a right-angle turn, a bathroom papered with the kind of print you usually see on flannel nightgowns, a sunroom whose sills were spotted with leaves, and a fireplace with a hearth. There was an old air hockey table with two broken legs and a chipped enamel stepping stool in the kitchen. The kitchen had blue tiles on the walls and was clean and provincial-looking. I signed the lease and Jeffrey made out a check for the security deposit and the first month’s rent.
Before we left, the man took us out back and showed us the yard, proudly, as if it were something he had invented. The previous tenants had left a sandbox and one lawn chair and a swing set. He let me give the swing a trial push and took a whole fistful of sand from the sandb
ox to let it sift through his fingers while we watched. He showed us the vine which had spread in all directions on the back fence. It’s rose, he said. Yellow rose. There is azalea too, and a clump of long tapered leaves he told us was iris. In August there are lots of bees, he said, but they stick to the flowers and don’t bother a soul.
On our lease it is stated quite clearly that we have the option to buy, that any money we’ve spent toward rent would go automatically toward purchase should we decide … The print is so small we have to read it with a magnifying glass from Jeffrey’s Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps that is what makes the possibility of buying seem so remote that we barely discuss it, the thought of ownership becoming like so many words in the dictionary. It is obsolete. It is not part of our vocabularly.
This house, we agree, is very nearly perfect. Nothing falters or slips, shatters or cracks. There are no cobwebs, no rust under the sinks, no spiders, nothing but an occasional ladybug or a moth with exquisite wings. It’s the type of house you’d want to live in for the rest of your life if you wanted to live in one house for the rest of your life. Jeffrey and I have been living together for four years and we’ve moved three times. It’s something we do well together. We wrap things in newspaper—cups, saucers, forks, spoons. We put them in boxes. We roll whole sheets of comics into balls and stuff them in the spaces. We tape the boxes shut. We write our names on them. We put them in my car and drive them across town to our new house. Our new house is always across town. South to north. North to west. West to east. I think of northwest, southeast, north-northeast. The possibilities are endless.
The other side of the house is owned by Katy and Sam. They are younger than we are and have a child, a little girl named Sharry. Sharry wears tiny red boxer shorts and a T-shirt with rabbits on it. The rabbits are copulating. She asked us several times, as we carted our furniture past her and into the house, if we had a birdbath. “It’s her favorite word,” Katy explained. “She’s never even seen one.” Katy is quite pregnant again and spends most of her time sitting on the front porch with her legs propped on pillows, reading or weaving on a table loom. She has a full face and thick dark hair and Jeffrey says she is the most beatific thing he’s ever seen. Sam is an economics professor at a local college we had never heard of. He doesn’t wear a shirt but keeps a red bandanna wrapped around his head. He is always in the back yard, “keeping it in shape.” I get tired just watching him, pruning the bushes and painting the gutters and building things. He built a playhouse for Sharry, a stone wall with a barbecue built into it, and a tiny brick patio hedged with pansies. There is a neat little fence between our yard and theirs. Sam apologized for it the very first time we met him. He said he built it just for something to do and if we wanted he would take it down.
Our street, like all others on this side of the park, is lined with magnolia and cherry trees; the grass underneath is thick with violets; the lawns are spotted with dandelions and cut haphazardly at best. It is pleasant at this time of year. Balls roll into the streets and children bounce after them. Tricycles rattle on the sidewalks at early morning and at dusk. On weekends the smell of barbecue floats into our rooms like an invitation. Today, because it is Sunday, Jeffrey dons the chef’s apron I bought him as a joke and sets bottle after bottle before him on the table to concoct, his wrists precise as a magician’s, the marinade I cannot duplicate. He cuts, with the cleaver he sharpens assiduously on the first Sunday of every other month, the filet into eight perfect cubes and drops them one by one into the marinade. Then he licks his fingers and starts on the vegetables—bell pepper, onion, tomato, all sliced into quarters and arranged geometrically by color on the cutting board, like a mosaic. Finally he peels four tiny new potatoes to be popped on the end of each skewer after all else has been speared, to keep everything in place.
There is a picture of a kangaroo on the apron I bought him. The kangaroo has a pocket from which poke the heads of various ladles and wooden spoons. Jeffrey looks young and foolish in the apron; I don’t know if he knows I bought it as a joke. Cooking, he said to me once, is part of the routine of making life seem more important than it is; it must be perfected.
Before cooking we go for a walk on the island of green in the center of the road, under a tunnel of magnolias. The flowers came all at once five days ago; they are luminous and pink and full. “I could stand here forever,” I say, “just looking at them.” Jeffrey says no, if you stand there long enough you’ll see them wither and drop. He has that half-smile on his face. “Just show me one thing,” he says, squeezing my breast, “that won’t wither and drop.”
In the distance someone is bouncing a ball and singing the alphabet song. A my name is Alma and I live in Alabama and my husband’s name is. “That’s why people have kids,” I say suddenly. “You don’t see it happen.”
We eat dinner on the back steps, fending off mosquitoes as evening settles around us and the swing set darkens. Next door on either side the children have quieted and all we can hear is the whisper of paper plates.
“All right,” says Jeffrey. “So you’ve convinced me. Now what?”
“Now what what?”
“What do we call it? Where will it sleep? When do we do it?”
“Do you love me?”
He taps a plastic fork against his teeth. “Explain the term,” he says. “Define it.”
Jeffrey is a better cook than I am. Every Sunday the marinade is slightly different. This is, I am certain, by design.
My parents first met him five years ago when they flew to the city for a visit. The four of us had dinner in a seafood restaurant. My mother in a beach hat, for atmosphere. Jeffrey ordered stuffed crab and asparagus spears, a civilized meal. The stuffed crab was all stuff and no crab and Jeffrey called the waiter to the table, silently, with one raised finger. “Did you forget the crab?” he asked innocently, and proceeded to pick at the food with his fork, lifting out morsels of breadcrumb and celery until nothing was left. He prodded the shell with a knife, poking it into the hollows. “It’s really quite a lovely shell,” he said. “Where’s the crab?”
“Would you care to see the manager?” The waiter peered at the plate, eyebrows raised. Our food was getting cold.
“No, thank you,” said Jeffrey. “I’d rather see the crab.”
The waiter left and returned with a plate of steaming crab meat. He spooned it into the shell and sprinkled it with the breadcrumbs and celery. “All yes,” Jeffrey said. My father winked at me from across the table. Later he pulled me aside. “Your Jeffrey will make a fine lawyer,” he said, slapping me hard on the back.
So Jeffrey makes it look like my idea, the baby. When he carts three boxes of books upstairs to the sunroom I say no, we’ll leave the sunroom empty, furnish it for Cris, when he or she is born. He feigns a surprised acquiescence; just yesterday he said the sunroom was the ideal room for a child, all those windows laced with ivy. Of course we are careful to say “he or she.” Katy calls her unborn child John, patting her belly each time she says it. It makes me terribly uncomfortable. I show her the house when most everything is in place. She says she wants to see what it’s like, a mirror image of her own house. “Like Alice in Wonderland,” she says. “Through the looking glass.” When we come to the sunroom I have to tell her we’re planning to use it as our library as soon as we get the shelves built. We don’t want anyone to know about Cris until they can see for themselves.
The sunroom has black and white tiles on its floor, and white walls with black trim around the windows. At midnight it glows like the inside of a shell, like a pearl, with a mute pale light. “It seems only fair that Cris should be conceived in his or her room,” says Jeffrey one night. We spread our big Mexican blanket on the floor, throw in two pillows, and take a bottle of liqueur from the nightstand in the bedroom. This goes on for four nights; on the fifth day my body is covered with small yellow bruises and I am certain my hips have been flattened like two weathered stones. My period starts early. Jeffrey is disappointed. He s
ays, “How can that be?” and smiles his half-smile as we fold up the blanket. We like to fold it just right, taking hold of the corners and standing at blanket’s length from one another, making sure the edges meet. It is something like a dance, our folding the blanket, ceremoniously, as if there were something inside.
More and more often I feel myself drawn to the porch, to Katy. She seems in perpetual repose and I wonder if this is her nature or her pregnancy. She wears those cotton maternity shifts with floral designs or stripes or polka dots. There is often a band of lace at the neck, and puffed sleeves similarly trimmed. The shifts have pockets shaped like hearts or apples; Sharry is always running up and sticking her hands in them, pulling out a bit of yarn, a cookie, a crayon. Katy fills the pockets in the morning and by evening, she tells me, they’re empty. When the sun hits she holds a reflector to her collarbone, serene and motionless as a lily pad.