I did some research to make sure I’d have nothing to regret. I visited Jill’s class and saw for myself the regimentation and the boredom. I checked out the nearby day schools, I asked the local council if she could be transferred. Then I told Oliver he’d won, and why, which he more or less understood. I knew the wrench wasn’t done for me. For one thing, Jill was by now outraged at the notion of leaving her school and home—and perhaps Frankie. But I knew that Oliver had been right about that part of it; she could take it. And I figured that once the thing was done, I could settle down myself to have a clearer look round the bramble patch.
3
AND THAT WAS PRETTY much the way things stood, when Oliver came to bed last night with a batch of papers. I was sleeping uneasily, with the imminence of Jill’s departure. His scratching pen woke me—single sharp scratches of irritated underlining. When he finished and snapped off the light he rolled straight to me, began nuzzling my shoulder and bent a cold leg across my thighs. The lack of transition annoyed me, and I pretended sleep for longer then could have been credible. It didn’t matter how long I pretended. Once he’s decided to make love, Oliver has every confidence of bringing me round. I’ve heard him dilate with the same confidence on the settlement of strikes: patience and firmness, and always look more willing than the other fellow is. Virginia asked me once what I missed most about being single. Necking, I said. She was worried for me, but I read between the lines from Grosvenor Square that she sees what I mean. So I pretended to be sleepier than I was, and Oliver wrapped his legs around mine and rocked himself patiently and willingly against me until his firmness impressed itself on my thigh. My irritation partly paled; it’s a form of flattery, after all, and I thought: it’ll be good for me, I always enjoy it once I’m started. It occurred to me that it might help me face Miss Meridene in the morning, more relaxed. It occurred to me that Oliver was sorry about Jill’s going. Sorry that he hadn’t made his reasons mine, and that he still believed a father’s reasons had more weight. And I was sorry too, that I couldn’t suit him better, since I’d chosen to live his life. Then he got to my ear and said, “You rangy broad,” and I turned to him, as if waking, with a provocative uvular.
There’s no discovery left in this process; the frontiers have all been mapped. And—it’s part of coming to terms with us—I no longer see why there should be. Oliver knows exactly how many drinks I must have had before it’s worth his urging fellatio, I know exactly how to make use of my early horseback riding, and we both know—my body takes his angle as familiarly as the mattress—that whereas my right breast is rousable and willing, there’s no use arguing with the left at all. My left breast isn’t on strike, it’s just bone-idle.
So we plied and stroked each other without error, his tongue freewheeled along my collarbone, and I made moan, not uncontrollably, but for the equally good reason that he likes it. He bit too hard and I jettisoned him, then he won me back with a swift ring of licks around my concave belly button, which has been an object of some wonder to him since he discovered that it would hold twenty-six small southern-French beach pebbles. His shaving scent made me think, as it always does, of the lemon groves in Pasadena Valley, and when he rubbed the nerves at the base of my spine there followed, as there sometimes does, the halo of aspen behind Jay Mellon’s head and the scare of sap in everything. I wondered briefly about Jay, tried to picture him as old as he must be now, and couldn’t, and forgot that, because the muscles of Oliver’s back seemed animal and young. My own length turned supple and I took him in, and worked with him until his shuddering deep in me brought shuddering from deep in me. And what more, after eleven years in the same bed, do you expect?
I woke from a kiss of incredible sweetness, in the yellow gorge, from Jay. To be honest, I would not have dreamed that dream if Oliver hadn’t pressed the nerves along my spine. And to be honest is hard, because it means I admit the cause and effect: it’s Freudian. To be honest, it’s hardest of all on Freud, that in a stock of middle-class clichés like mine, his name signifies the devaluation of human feeling.
But I don’t devalue that feeling. I can’t even discredit what I felt then. Jay was a middle-aged history teacher trapped in the anger of his own mismanaged history. I was an eighteen-year-old Baptist naïf. The general terrors he dared me toward—beer, communism, sex—split the boundaries of my world for me more than he could have known. But when he turned out to mean it, dared me to run away to Japan with him, the terror was so near as to become irrelevant.
We sat on a yellow sandstone shelf over a pool where the water sucked and swirled before continuing its descent. When I dragged a foot in the water a school of little fish came curiously to my toes and began to suck with their minute mouths. Behind Jay’s long, eroded face was an aspen that seemed to sprout from him like an outrageous mane. I settled my head in his lap and closed my eyes to hide from his.
He said, “You could come with me.”
He leaned to kiss me, he stroked and pressed the nerves along my spine. My center left me, my thighs began to loosen, gelatinous, and with an awful sickness I recognized the juice in everything. The sap running in the aspen, mucus and saliva alive in Jay, blood and beer coursing down to my toes where the fish quivered in the racing stream, the stream roping down through stone to feed the aspen roots. Liquid in the fibers of existence, linking everything.
“I’m sorry, Jay. I’m trying to change direction. I’ve been going east.”
“Japan is the East, Virginia.”
“No, I know, but it’s not the same.” I tried to see “the East” but I had rehearsed no images for it as I had for “east.” I could see the Iowa grain going past, I could smell Broadway and the subway, I could feel Gainsborough’s black turf between my toes. But what did I know of Japan? A slit-eyed draggle-bearded granddaddy in a beaded doorway out of some war flick, wigs with chopsticks poked in them, a lacquer-handled dagger, a dragon embroidered on sleazy silk.
“It’s not the same,” I said. “We’d go west to get there, wouldn’t we?”
“I couldn’t afford to take you the other way around.”
By which time I had refused, which both of us knew but only Jay was ready to acknowledge. I remember thinking defensively that eighteen was too young to make such a choice; a decision like that would affect the rest of your life! I think it escaped my notice that this also was a choice.
Now I lay in the milky English morning light, cocooned in that kiss, not daring to move for fear of dispelling it. Everything I remember of the yellow gorge was at my mouth: the cliff, the aspen quaking, the cold stream purling, the tickling fishes. Those fish must have been gray. They must have been minnows or some little river trout. I remember them as brilliant orange; I don’t know, perhaps as jeweled. When Jill was born I bought an Aeolian harp of little fishes, strung on wires to twist in the air, painted metal set with glass. Made in Japan. I suppose I must remember them like that.
So when Jill crawled in with me I resisted her as I had Oliver, drew the covers over my head and myself back into the yellow gorge and let her timid child’s-grief wait, unwilling to trade that emotion for the other. Can a mother do that? She isn’t by nature forbearing like Oliver. She braided her fingers in my hair and made two fists against my neck. She didn’t speak but she dragged me, literally, by the nape of the neck, back into the day’s ordeal.
“You promise,” she said when I opened my eyes.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully, hating her.
“If I don’t like it I don’t have to stay, do I, Mummy? You promise.”
Her face was half an inch from my face. The curtain flapped at the open window and her pupils pulsed with the coming and going of the light. I know Jill’s eyes; I’ve painted them. They’re violent and taciturn, a ring of gas-blue points like cold explosion to the outside boundary or iris, the whole held back with its brilliant lens. A detonation under glass.
“You promise, Mummy,” she demanded.
I was excellent. I explained about ad
justment, with illustrations from her own experience. She had cried the first day at the new house; at first she was frightened of dear old Mr. Wrain. There was even a time—did she remember?—when she thought she didn’t like strawberries and cream! And there were strawberry beds at St. Margaret’s; I had seen them.
I put her toothbrush and slippers in the packed bag, made breakfast for the three of us, chattered and padded gaily about while she hung behind me, stricken with my betrayal. And I was betraying her. Not with the cheer—I had no other choice than that—but because while I spread her favorite jam and plaited her California-colored hair, while I told her stories of my own first school and praised the buckles of her new black shoes, all the time I was hoping that somehow, on the drive, I would be free of the trivia and the stress, free to slip back into the sweet, uncomplicated drowning of Jay’s kiss.
But I wore her down to resignation with an hour of it. Oliver and I watched from the threshold of her room as she lined her dolls on the windowseat for good-byes. She admonished Jemima for having lost an eye, clucked at Twinkie for an untied lace, mimicked to perfection my forced cheer.
“Now you’re puffickly able to take care of yourselves till I get back,” she said, “and if you’re ever so good I’ll take you to the sampit and have a lovely time. Or otherwise I’ll paddle your skedaddle for you.” The glances that parents exchange, concurring in the splendor of their children, produce a network of minute ties stronger than any of the great vows, the great crises. I could almost have said to Oliver, “It’s all right. I’ve accepted it,” when Jill turned and caught us watching her.
“Isn’t it terrible about those boys and their dirty minds.”
“Who’s been telling you about dirty minds?” I asked, outraged.
“Mr. Glynweather in assembly,” Jill replied, and I felt the triumph emanating from Oliver: it was time we got her out of that school.
“What did he say about them?” I insisted.
“I don’t know. Just about them.” She lovingly gathered up Martha, the favorite, whom she was allowed to take along. “It’s very sad, though,” she said, flicking nonchalantly past us. “It’s ever so dark down there.”
“Down where?” Oliver asked after her.
“Down in the dirty minds. And they don’t have bathtubs and they’re hungry and they don’t get proper schooling.”
We laughed. My triumph now. Who at St. Margaret’s was going to berate the conditions of the poor? And—taking us back to the old arguments—how were the sons of miners to get proper schooling as long as people like us sent our daughters to St. Margaret’s? Half a beat later it struck me as odd, as quintessentially, as cataclysmically, odd, that I should have a daughter who, at six, would use a phrase like “proper schooling.” I wanted to get out on the winter road with Jay. I also wanted to say to Oliver, look, we’ve had another battle here without a word. It’s the way we are; it doesn’t matter, we’re all right. I can say that sort of thing to Oliver. Before the end of the week I probably will.
But it was time to get Jill’s things in the car, and when that was done I went for my portfolio, cursing the accident that I had to present my new designs on the day of her leaving. I think I blamed Oliver for the timing, though he’s not to blame. He offered to take the sketches on for me, but I lied possessively that I might want to look them over before I faced the board. He smiled indulgently. He’s very dapper in the morning, after coitus or before a board meeting, and this was both.
We found a way to wedge the portfolio behind the seat of my mini. Then we went to look for Jill, and found her, hatted and uniformed for St. Margaret’s, hugging the damp trunk of her climbing tree.
“Come on, honey,” Oliver said firmly, but when she left the tree for him, when she locked her arms and legs around him and buried her face in his neck in a silence more awful than crying, when he tried to disengage her and couldn’t, he turned appealingly to me, as if surprised—as if surprised!—and faltered, “We … can always fetch her back.”
I could have murdered him. I couldn’t speak for rage. After the reasons, after the wrenching, after my not-promising, the most foreseeable moment arrives and he unprepared! I dragged Jill from him, putting myself distinctly in the wrong.
“She’ll love it!” I trilled hysterically, and deposited her in the car.
And that was the end of Jay. It was nearly the end of us, for what I’d like to have done to Oliver I did to the gears and road. I drove through the sleepy curves of Eastley Village as I used to drive down the L.A. Freeway. I came down Eastley Hill at sixty and pumped savagely at the brakes only feet before the crossroads; I enjoyed the panicked gawp of a man with a six-ton load of Courage Pale Ale.
It did us both good, that. It scared us simple. I grinned at Jill and she grinned sheepishly back and put her pigtail in her mouth. I didn’t mention it. I felt certain that St. Margaret’s would cure her of that habit, and although I have idly nagged her about it for a third of her six years, I was suddenly outraged for her sake. What business is it of theirs if my daughter wants to eat her hair?
“We’re going to get good and sick of this road, you and I,” I said. “Why don’t you study it and see how many of the farms you can remember on the way back next month?”
We improved on that and gave the horses names: Tessa, Joe and Prince, Jill’s choices. Teton, Hannibal and Momoyama, mine.
I don’t think a love of horses can be hereditary, but one of the things I recognize in my daughter is the lift of spirit that follows a running horse. A shag-hoofed white mare broke to our left and took off across the fields ahead of us. Jill strained up in her seat and clutched at Martha’s arms, rocking them for reins. At forty, we passed the mare in seconds, but Jill was on the horse and going faster still. I knew what she was feeling. I don’t remember any speed—though I have hot-rodded and jetted and survived the bucking of a speedboat over the Catalina surf—I don’t remember any speed like that of a horse at gallop.
“Did I ever tell you about the horse I had in Seal Beach?” I asked.
“Yes.” But it wasn’t to put me off. Her hands stilled Martha’s arms, waiting.
“It wasn’t really mine, it belonged to Mr. Beckelstein, who owns the trailer camp.”
“Caravan park,” Jill translated, encouraging.
“A dapple-gray mare, blind in one eye, and she only lived that summer. I don’t know why he bought her. But he offered me a nickel a day to exercise her.”
She glanced at me, alight with greed.
“She was shy of noises on the blind side, and once a dumb boy came down a dune on purpose in his wagon to see if she’d throw me.”
“And she did.”
“Right in the sea.”
I rode that mare along the surf morning, evening, afternoon. Unlike me she wasn’t afraid of the water, and she liked to plunge straight into the sea—if no one was watching I dropped the reins and clenched my fists in her coarse mane for terror—meet a breaker at the level of her knees and then turn and climb cantering out of it as the wave collapsed back into the sea.
Our route to the shore was a channel bridged both by the highway and by some minor line of the Southern Pacific, and at ten and two on weekdays I would gallop the mare to the crossing and dismount. Then when the freight train came, with a racket that seemed to make the concrete of the little bridge thunder, I would stand on tiptoe and fairly wrench my shoulder out of joint with waving. The driver and his mate watched for me; I would see them leaning out, peering, from a great distance, to return my wave. These meetings were the goal of my day, luminous with comradeship.
I tried, as we approached and entered the grounds of St. Margaret’s, to convey to Jill, as a promise for her, something of the glory of those horseback rides. She listened, intent and impassive, except that one forefinger scratched at Martha’s plastic face.
The famous flatness of East Anglia is a myth perpetuated by those who have never crossed Iowa. St. Margaret’s is approached through green hillocks of trees now
, in the clear cold air, as stern, as gray, as intricate as its own towers. Just before the abbey itself is an ancient village, every stone of it hallowed and protected by the love of the local council, and in this village we encountered a string of St. Margaret’s girls on horseback. They were dressed identically in gray jodhpurs and black peaked caps. They rode exquisitely, their weight lodged firmly against their heels, so that they scarcely bounced above the trim trot of the shining horses.
“Oh, look, Jill!” I rolled my window down and waved to the lead girl. The girl let her crop fall slightly lower, the only indication she had seen me. Her long neck was prettily arched and her eyes down, her expression the requisite hauteur of an English horsewoman. She was perhaps thirteen.
Jill can’t have cried for my reasons, but she began to cry. To keep myself from it, I jammed the accelerator again, shot out of the village and over the last knoll into the graveled drive. I parked and took her in my arms. She wept. She clung to me, her fingers clenching convulsively at my back, and I sat there looking over her head at the stern stone arches of St. Margaret’s, and I came very close to driving out again.
“I don’t have to, do I, Mummy? Please don’t leave me. Please.”
And why should I? What’s the compulsion stronger than this plea, that I should steel myself against myself, put down all the remnants of rebellion in me and abandon my daughter to those venerable walls and the companionship of privileged adolescents? Oliver? I could handle Oliver. He was ready to give in himself. I could do it—I could take her home, say, “Oliver, I couldn’t. I wanted to, I tried. But finally it seemed wrong to me, and I can’t wrong Jill.” Put that way, he would accept it. And then … And then we would send her back to the village school, and Oliver wouldn’t mention it again, but we would live in perpetual hostility, because Oliver can’t believe that a woman should have her way in this sort of disagreement. He can’t believe it, any more than I can believe a smug face is an ornament to horsemanship. I didn’t say to myself that I must sacrifice Jill to Oliver, but that is what I meant. What I said to myself was, she’ll survive. She’ll like it soon, I know it. I wouldn’t choose for her not to learn, and the only alternative is a massive home education plan that would involve my whole life and effort. And would leave her all the same solitary and odd. Children must go to school.
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