Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  The fact is that I paid no attention to this when we bought the house. I remember—or rather Oliver has reminded me—that when some fraught local mother warned us, I tossed it off by saying that you never know what’s going to suit a child. My education was all finger paint and self-expression, and I’d wanted to learn Greek. The real reason was that I couldn’t see ahead that far. All I could see was Jill among the peonies. We’d fallen into a routine full of ease and discovery, the end of which was no more real to me than death. If I’d thought about it I might have had another child, but I didn’t think. I designed in the mornings with the satisfaction of increasing control. In the afternoons we went out, whatever the weather, and when we came back Jill painted out of big glass jars, and I painted and painted Jill. The formality of her three-year-old beauty awakened a painful exhilaration in me. There was absolutely no disciplining her. When I scolded her she laughed and when I spanked her she turned on me with blazing blame, “I’m not having you in this house!” and there never seemed to be a middle ground in which she took the lesson. I know, and I can pretty well understand, that some women are worn listless by life with a toddler, but what I mainly wanted to do was to paint Jill: Jill raging, Jill swashbuckling, Jill exasperating, up to her eyes in tempera. And unlike Mr. Glynweather of the local school, I never had to clean up the paint.

  There was that precedent, when we came to quarrel about her schooling, that Oliver had been right about the maid. It was when we were entertaining a German, the one whose contract earned Oliver his first promotion. I was skittish about my cooking, frustrated of my evening’s work, pregnant and cross. Oliver said we should have a maid and I told him to fuck off.

  “Don’t be so crude. We can afford it.”

  “We can afford a Mercedes-Benz. But I’m not going to start lugging status symbols around at my age, thanks.”

  “You’re barmy. That is your status symbol, refusing to have a maid.”

  “A maid, a maid, if you please. She can wear black crepe and a frilly cap.”

  “She can wear what she damn well pleases.”

  “Like me.”

  “If you don’t like what you wear, you can go out and replace everything in your cupboard tomorrow.”

  “Can I? Well, what I like to wear is blue jeans and baggy sweaters.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Oh, sure. And the first time George Nicholson comes to tea, you’ll get the sack.”

  “You know, Virginia, you’re a snob.”

  I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t stand that, his turning everything upside down like that. I was choked for a minute, during which he said, “Will you just look at your hands.”

  There it is, you see, I’m a snob and besides that my hands are unpresentable. As a matter of fact, my hands were a mess not because of any scrubbing but because the dissolving fluid cracked them and the paint ran in the cracks. I wanted to make him see what a phony he was, but I couldn’t speak. So I picked up a wedding present and smashed his collarbone.

  He whammed back against the kitchen wall with a whimsical expression on his face, and I stood there with the ashtray. The ashtray wasn’t hurt. That German was up in the guest room eating chocolate creams. I put down the ashtray and began to cry, and Oliver said, quick, he thought it was broken and there, there, don’t carry on, we’d better make up a story and get to the hospital. I was falling apart with remorse and love of Oliver, and even then, I noticed, he was more worried about the German than himself or me.

  I ran up and said Oliver had fallen down the stairs, and we got him taped up at the hospital and then he had a week in armchairs of the most winning offhand bravery. Come to think of it, maybe East Anglian owes that contract to me.

  I couldn’t nurse Oliver and the German, so we got a maid. She wore blue jeans and baggy sweaters and her name was Virginia. I liked her better than anybody I’d met since California. And when Jill was born, she freed me to live my life around paint and Jill.

  This is Oliver: he’s never made me pay for his collarbone. He could have blackmailed me into groveling pulp by now if he’d wanted to. He comes forevermore back to the argument about my snobbery, but he’s never made use of the fact that the one time before he forced an uppercrust emblem on me, I came round. We haven’t got Virginia anymore. She’s holed up within a stone’s throw of Grosvenor Square with a Maoist from Liverpool—I get apologetic letters from her now and then—and we have got, like the rest of East Anglian, an Old Treasure; but I could no more cope without her than without my hands. Sometimes when I have stood fists clenched and glowering at Oliver’s wonderfully contorted face, I’ve wanted to say, for heaven’s sake, Oliver, you’re missing out your best point. But he has his rules.

  Jill began, at five, short days at the local school, and it was awful. She came home tired and sour, full of pent-up anger. I tried for a while to paint it, but that no longer seemed the point. It might have been easier if she hadn’t been so articulate about it. “If I want to put orange grass I don’t see why I can’t and it’s none of their business,” she said, quite reasonably, in my opinion. She came home one afternoon, took a bamboo switch and lopped the heads off all the daffodils in the orchard. Not a few; all of them. Two thousand maybe. A Yellow Massacre.

  I went down to the orchard with her. I cared about the daffodils, no use pretending I didn’t, but about Jill I was frantic. I tried to get her to help me put the heads back on, to impress her with the finality of her destruction. But while I pretended surprise and dismay that I couldn’t keep them together, Jill laughed furiously and ground the slit throats in the grass.

  We’d have to do something, I said, and Oliver did something. He inquired among the senior members of East Anglian, Ltd., and came up with St. Margaret’s Gothic-abbey boarding school for girls. It was only an hour away by car and she could come home for the first weekend of every month. They had horseback riding, finger painting, new math and Greek—the works.

  I rejected it out of hand. Obviously our troubles had started when Jill began spending days away from home. The idea of mooning around that garden from week to week without her made my blood run cold. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath!

  “She’ll get used to it,” Oliver said. “She’s independent enough to take it.”

  “She may be, but I’m not.”

  I meant to close the matter. And it might have been closed, aside from an occasional thrust and parry when Jill was in a temper, except that Frankie Billingham opened it on another plane. The Billinghams run a small farm half a mile from here, and they have to contend with six children, a hundred and fifty pigs, and perpetual skirmishes with their neighbors over the smell. They are a violent lot. I have seen Mrs. Billingham herding the children with a pig switch, and I’ve heard the blows being dealt even from the road, though the pig yard lies between the road and the house. I have no evidence, mind you, that Mrs. Billingham ever sent Mr. Billingham to the hospital with an ashtray, but the children’s faces are guerrilla ground, and Frankie lives mostly on the road. He’s been several times on his own to play with Jill, who idolizes the fierceness of him, but he won’t come on invitation, and my attempts to bribe him with ice lollies have been met with arrogant suspicion.

  One Saturday in October I was mixing ink on the windowsill while Jill collected colored leaves outside. Frankie came along the road with an older girl, perhaps about seven, perhaps his sister, though I didn’t know her. They made purposefully for our gate and came for Jill. Arranging her leaves, she didn’t see them until they shadowed her, and then, still squatting, she looked up with delight.

  “Go on,” the girl said.

  Frankie hesitated for a second, then knelt down in front of Jill and began to pound her in the chest.

  “Hit her in the face, hit her in the face!” the girl shouted, and Frankie, both fists clenched but only one fist pounding, brought his knuckles down on Jill’s eyes and nose with the implacable rhythm of a machine. I watched him frozen for a second and then dashed ou
tside. The girl caught sight of me and ran, but Frankie, wholly absorbed in his work, didn’t notice me until I caught his wrist on an upswing and jerked him to his feet. I used to think myself incapable of murder. I think now that if I wanted to find someone incapable of murder, I wouldn’t go looking among mothers. I felt huge with shaky strength. His wrist was as horny, small and brittle as a bird’s leg in my fingers. Oliver had come down by then, and I left Jill with him; I don’t think I looked back to see how badly she was hurt. I dragged Frankie the half mile home and I don’t remember it. I wasn’t even tired. I pulled him through the pig yard and whipped him round to his back door, which opened immediately on Mrs. Billingham.

  “He …” I said, and the strength left me. Mrs. Billingham’s eyebrows were knotted and sweating. Behind her a pot of something gray was boiling over on the stove, and a baby in an undershirt was sitting in a pile of flour. I still had my mixing stick in one hand and I’d splashed a few drops of paint on Frankie’s face like turquoise freckles. I was aware of his thumping pulse in the circle of my fingers. His hand had gone cold.

  “Well, he was … hitting my little girl,” I said, and Mrs. Billingham wrenched his arm away from me. He stood in her grip with his elbow cocked over his head.

  “But it wasn’t his fault,” I said, and suddenly I realized that this was true. “An older girl, I don’t know who, she ran away … a girl made him.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Mrs. Billingham said with a nastiness meant for me as well as Frankie. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t punish him!” I called, but the door slammed.

  I panted back through the yard and supported myself on a stone wall. The pigs snorted lazily, and beyond them I could hear the impact of what must have been a belt, and Frankie’s shrieking. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do. What I could do I’d done.

  I stumbled back along the road and Oliver came to meet me, carrying Jill. The bruises were rising on her forehead and there was dry blood around her nose, but she was all right. She’d stopped crying.

  “I hope you pulverized the little bastard,” Oliver said.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I cried, and let Oliver take my weight too, against him. I told him about the girl, and he was willing to see the point, but it only irritated him when I said the worst of it was my fault.

  We came back to the subject of St. Margaret’s in the evening. Well, I guess Frankie took his medicine and I took mine. We began that evening the longest and bitterest in an impressive history of quarrels. Oliver said that we had to save Jill from the atmosphere of that school.

  “This afternoon had nothing to do with the school,” I said. “It’s Frankie’s home. The school is probably a relief to him.”

  “It’s not going to be a relief to Jill as long as Frankie’s in her class.”

  “I know, but that’s my fault …”

  “Don’t be dim. You’re never happy unless you’re guilty for something.”

  “I’ll bring him around. He likes Jill …”

  “Virginia, I don’t understand you. Your kid’s nose is nearly broken …”

  “Oliver, don’t you see that Frankie needs Jill in his school.”

  “So he can break her nose.”

  “I’d rather have it broken than have it shoved permanently in the air by some snob-Gothic goon academy.”

  And we were off. My position was that Oliver really wanted his daughter “finished” into an appropriate specimen of Young English Womanhood, and wanted at all costs to keep her out of the destructive atmosphere of pig farmers’ sons. Oliver’s position was that, whereas he was thinking about Jill, I was willing to sacrifice her to an image of myself as a benevolent liberal. There was plenty to be said for both arguments, and I truly think we said it all. Our fights have been developing their pattern through the years, and over Jill they achieved pure ritual. It used to be that we couldn’t stop without a physical blow or a fit of tears, followed by an aggressive-apologetic bout in bed. But there wasn’t the energy for that every day through a whole autumn. We got so either of us could call a truce with a particularly exhausted sigh, sleep on it and begin again refreshed at breakfast. Breakfasts were terrible, keeping the tone conversational for Jill’s sake, and ritualistically ripping the guts out of a poached egg. When Jill was gone—ironically, Frankie never threatened her again and she began to settle in at school—we had half an hour before Oliver had to leave for the office.

  “This is Jill I’m talking about, Jill our daughter, whom you profess to love.”

  “I understand that, Oliver. But I don’t see why it isn’t possible to think about Jill and a few other million kids at the same time.”

  “Oh, I do admire your scope. A few million!”

  “The fact is that education in this country is being …”

  “The fact is that a little girl in this house is being turned into an angry, aggressive, destructive little bitch because she’s in an angry, aggressive, destructive little school. Is that the fact or isn’t it?”

  “It is and it isn’t. It’s her age as well. According to Spock …”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Well, what does St. Margaret’s turn little girls into, can you tell me that? A place called St. Margaret’s, my dear. Who the hell was St. Margaret?”

  “As a matter of fact there’s a state school in Eastley Village called St. Timoetheus, and they’ve got nothing but factory hands in that district.”

  “Oh, well, thank God we don’t live there.”

  Sometimes Oliver’s arguments hit home. He said, for instance, that the reason I was so indifferent to our money was not from any real sympathy for people who had none. Quite the opposite. It was a way of proving myself superior to everybody, my parents included, who had to think about money all the time. It’s a subtle argument, but the subtlety isn’t all Oliver’s. It’s true that money pervaded the atmosphere of my childhood like smog, though I didn’t know it. It’s only at this distance that I can see how Henry Ford had a place in my bedtime stories beside Ali Baba and Robin Hood; how the symbol that dominated religion was a neon thermometer flashing the progress of the church building fund; how my parents, who seemed to have no passion but economy, had in fact no pleasure but to spend. And yet it’s only in England that I’ve discovered my father was a member of the working class. There’s no working class in America. We were Baptists; we were Westerners; we were Law-Abiding; we had Ideas. If there was any class-consciousness in my consciousness then, I’d have to say we considered ourselves the elite: morally, because we drank no alcohol; physically, because we lived in seasonless sun; mentally, because my mother liked pictures and went on purpose to museums to look at them. I felt none of the gulf that I should have felt in England, as the daughter of a laborer, between myself and the great universities, the great careers. It was common enough to drive two hundred miles to a square dance. I saw no reason I shouldn’t travel at the same offhand speed over the social highways of America. I was ambitious, I suppose, but I didn’t know it was ambition. Ambition was as usual in our town as bread.

  Half the reason, Oliver said, that I wouldn’t send my daughter to an expensive school, was that I could recognize it as an ambition my mother might have had. I lost that round.

  In fact, I lost. The arguments wore me down; they tired me essentially; they aged me. When Oliver started to attack through Jill, tempting her with visions of St. Margaret’s horseback rides, I was scared. Oliver’s fairer than that. I saw that he wasn’t going to give in, and if I didn’t either, this quarrel was going to lurch right on through Jill’s adolescence. I considered the alternative, of taking Jill and leaving him. When I did that, I came up against the blunt probability that I love my husband. It came to me, after eleven years, as a nasty shock.

  Like every child of the forties brought up on Barbara Stanwyck and Tyrone Power, my parents’ marriage had seemed a shabby affair to me. I could have sat out the bickering and the periods of pointless martyrdom, but when my m
other smiled up seraphically out of that bramble patch and assured me that my father was the dearest thing on earth to her, I was choked with hot derision. I discovered now, her dead and me at thirty-two, that I owed her a profound apology. If I once wanted emotion as apocalypse, what I have is as gnarled and stunted as a tree in chalk, but it isn’t dead. I’m not suited to Oliver. I don’t agree with him and I don’t forgive him. He enters things, he takes them at the value they take themselves, and I pull against it, arrogant and didactic. He uses words like “finalize” that make me squirm in my chair, and I use words like “codswallop” that make him squirm in his. I’m clumsy too—cats leap on windowsills to avoid me—whereas Oliver can lounge convincingly in French Provincial. So we grate each other, our corners get rubbed off. But when he goes away for the weekend I go, at least once, to the medicine cabinet, to smell his shaving things.

  It’s harassing, but it’s organic; it’s a peculiar place, it’s home. I discovered that for eleven years I’d been living as if it were temporary. I’m not so naïve that I haven’t noticed how much, like everybody else, we concern ourselves with things and taxes. I don’t run everywhere as I used to, and Oliver’s humor is not so fresh. But I thought that was age, and age doesn’t trouble me overmuch. I know that we’ve chosen compromises, but no choice has seemed to lead inevitably to another. I thought we could go this direction but keep our essential selves intact, and turn off any side road that took our fancy. There are two thousand people the work of whose hands depends on Oliver’s decisions, there are women in Stuttgart and Carmarthenshire out shopping in my cherry blossoms, we have textile stock and two cars and two careers and a daughter—we’ve even planted asparagus—and all this time I’ve believed we would some day slough the lot of it to discover ourselves in peace and passion. Doing what, I don’t know: weaving grass mats in the Caribbean. And now we stand facing each other and I see we have discovered ourselves. We’re right about each other. Oliver does want his daughter finished, and I do want to sneer at a life I can’t do without. We’re right about each other, and what do we gain by that? This is what we’ve got, take it or leave it. I couldn’t leave it.