by Mary Gordon
She wants to say to Ira: I can’t give my mother one more second of my life. I won’t draw or fail to draw another breath on her account. My husband and my mother can live without me. They may do better. It’s only my self-love that keeps me here. I am in love with” my own image, the honorable one, honoring the promises.
Yet I do not honor them.
I honor you.
I am a faithless wife.
I do not love my mother.
As she dials the number she is thinking of the faithless wives of movies. How quickly they turn into murderers. And the ungrateful daughters, dancing while their famished mothers labor through the night.
As the phone pips—the modern signal, stripped of romance and powerful intent—she waits to hear her lover’s voice. “You always answer the phone like you’re expecting the sheriff,” she tells him. Even before he answers, she knows she can’t say what she’d just thought of saying. It’s impossible, she thinks, we’ll never live together.
She knows she couldn’t say to Vincent, “Granddaddy, I’m moving in with my lover now.” It would be a ridiculous sentence, she thinks, the product of the modern age. Antibiotics and a loosening of sexual mores. He would never understand.
She thinks of Vincent’s face, grown dark with disappointment when she tells him. She can never tell him. For her to have a life with Ira, both her grandfather and her mother would have to die. How easy it is, she thinks, to wish the death of another person. Is considering it wishing it? No. She doesn’t want Vincent dead. She doesn’t want him absent from the world. She does not want him lonely among the rootless dead. She wants him in the world with her. But she would almost rather see him dead than hurt him.
When she hears Ira’s voice, the sound of it makes her blame him. Blame him for what? For the sentence she has formulated in her brain, the wish for two people’s deaths, which, without him, would never have been able to exist.
“Where the hell were you?” she says.
He answers: “In the shower, sweetheart.”
She thinks he wouldn’t call her sweetheart if he knew what was in her heart. She would like to cry. She would like him to come and take her away. She would like him to meet her grandfather. None of these things is possible.
She tells him that her, mother won’t go to her parents’ house. Won’t be there to meet her father. As she promised.
“Well,” he says, “you have to understand.”
“Nothing,” she says, “there’s nothing that I have to understand. You’re the one that has to understand. My mother, as always, got exactly what she wanted. My mother always gets exactly what she wants.”
“All right,” he says.
“All right what?”
“Can you come here now? For a little while? Before you get your grandfather.”
She knows that they are in the house now. Waiting for her. Waiting for her and her mother.
“They’re all waiting for me,” she says.
“Just tell them. Tell them that she’s not coming. That she’s sick. Then come here and be with me.”
The gift of a simple sentence. Just come here and be with me. His simple sentence allows her to say one as simple.
“I want to be with you,” she says.
It is Saturday. It’s all right to go to Ira’s apartment; her in-laws, the Ulichnis, have gone to Pennsylvania. She’ll go right now, for just an hour. She’ll call her grandparents’ house, tell them the news by phone. Tell a lie on the telephone. She’ll say: My mother needs another hour to get ready. She just needs a little bit more time.
Sometimes, when she knows she will be with him in a little while, the last minutes before she sees him are unbearable. She can’t wait to see him, she feels that she literally cannot wait. Every one of her cells seems lit up. Pinpoints of expectation dot her skin. Her bones empty themselves of solid matter. Her neck, like an expectant bird’s, stretches out.
She thinks of how lucky she is. How fortunate, she thinks, to have a body, to be young, healthy, capable of pleasure, no, not only pleasure, this bodily joy. She grabs her purse. She flies out of the door like one of the carefree teenagers she worshipped in the movies. Her hair swings out behind her. She runs to her car.
But then she sees her husband driving up the driveway, pulling his car in beside hers, holding his hands like a visor above his eyes as if she were something that hurt his vision. All the quickness in her body seizes up, as if she had been riding on an elevator which suddenly stopped in the basement, landing in the darkness, failing to open up its doors. She smiles, the flinching smile she always gives him. She thinks it must be terrible for him always to be greeted as she greets him. Tenderly, she sees his yellow short-sleeved shirt, his striped tie, his brown pants and black fake-leather belt, his gray suede oxfords with a line of black making a horseshoe shape around the toe and arch. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she wants to say every time she sees him. Why don’t you leave me, she wants to say. You’re a good man, you could be happy. You could have a life without me, why do you let me cut off your life?
They never touch. It must be ten years since she’s kissed him. She puts her hand on the top of the car door, where the window would be if it were closed rather than open, where his arm would be if he hadn’t moved it inside the car when he saw her approach.
“Hi,” she says. “You’re home early.”
“I took a personal day,” he says. “I thought you might need me around.”
“That was nice,” she says, “thank you.”
“Your mother all right?”
She snorts. “She never meant to go. She’s up in bed. I guess she’ll stay there.”
“Want me to stick around?” he says. “In case she needs anything.”
“No,” she says. “Whatever you want. You want to come over to Linden Street after he’s home? I don’t know that I’d recommend it. With that crew.”
“No,” he says, “you know I’m not one for parties.”
“Some party,” she laughs. “Fun at the house of Atreus.”
She realizes he doesn’t get the reference; it’s another thing she’s done to him, after everything else, one more thing.
“Thanks a lot for being so thoughtful,” she says.
He shrugs. “Things were slow anyway. Down at work.”
“Anyway, it was really nice.”
“Never mind,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”
In the car, driving to Ira, she begins to cry. What could she do for Bob to make things better? She never wanted to hurt him, but she understands that marrying her, meeting her even, was the worst thing that could have happened in his life. She knows it’s too late for him; she wishes he wouldn’t go on being good to her and her mother. Doing things around the house. She wishes he’d run amok, set a fire in the basement, burn them both up in their beds. It’s what we deserve, she says to herself. Both of us. No, not her. It wasn’t her. No one did anything but me.
She stops at a pay phone. She forgot to call them at her grandparents’. Marilyn answers. Thank God. Marilyn. Later she’ll tell Marilyn the truth.
For now a lie, useful, simple, handy as a bottle opener, will serve. For the hundredth time, she’s appalled by what she’ll do to be with Ira. Lies, betrayals, jealousies, all the things she satirized or vilified in other women. Sometimes she wants to stop everything with Ira, because what she feels for him has made her a person she would otherwise never have been. She is subject to her feelings. She is, more often than ever in her life, a person doing things she can’t approve. A person she can’t recognize as still herself.
Once she got a glimpse of herself in a bathroom mirror. She was shocked at the sight.
They were together in a hotel for the weekend. They had slept too late to get room service. He went out to get a paper, coffee, some sweet cake. She was alone in a room he had just left.
She washed her face. She looked into the mirror above the sink. Her own face surprised her pleasantly. It looked so happy. His shaving things were
on the shelf before her. On the ledge was a little wavelet of his shaving soap, delicious as whipped cream. She scooped it with her second finger as if she were stealing frosting from a cake. Then she rubbed the cream between her breasts. It disappeared; she was pleased at this absorption. Her eye fell on his shaving kit: black, oblong, nearly empty. Its brass-colored zipper cut a gash through pimply Leatherette. She forcefully disliked the object; it beamed out enmity when she looked at it; she didn’t know why. And then she understood. She looked at a label, green and white, an airline sticker with his name and old address in his ex-wife’s handwriting. The handwriting she hated, the boarding-school girl’s slant printing: proof of a privilege the woman, she knew, had done nothing with. His ex-wife was a failure, Cam had thought with brimming happiness. To think of her made Cam’s lip curl. How could he? Why her? And if her, why me? The label present in the room with her struck her as an assault. Polite, well bred, it staked the other woman’s claim. Cam felt herself seized by inspiration: she felt it in the roots of her hair. Stiff figures, illumined, whispered in her ear. Told her that if she could rip the label off in one magic, ritual stroke, leaving no trace, no corner, no shadow of residual glue, that she would have effaced the other woman’s claim. She and Ira would be happy for the rest of their long, happy, and prosperous lives.
She didn’t allow herself to catch her own eye in the mirror. Approaching the bag as if she were about to crack a safe, she hesitated, studied the angles, then proceeded. There was only one chance for victory.
She succeeded. Her heart was filled with joy. She ripped the label up and threw it in the toilet. Her heart guiltily pounding, she flushed the evidence. Bathing her burning cheeks, she saw her eyes in the mirror. The lurid eyes of bloody triumph.
She was horrified. She thought: My God, look at what I’ve turned into. A primitive, living by signs and portents, turned on by the obliteration of another woman, whose only crime was to take her place before me in a bed. Everything I hate I am.
She thought she’d tell Ira: he’d make it into a joke and it would lose its force.
She never told him. She was too afraid.
She sees Ira is glad she didn’t ring the bell, that she used the key he has had made for her. She sees he’s spent the minutes since they talked laying out food. He likes to feed her. Nothing nourishing. Starches and salty foods, Boursin, halvah, peanut M & M’s, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Entenmann’s Sour Cream Cake. It always surprises her, the decorative small dishes in which he presents these foods. An odd set of possessions, she thinks, for a man who doesn’t own a colander.
They eat the food they both know is quite bad for them. He tells her a story from the office. He asks about her cousin Marilyn. Her fate: the pliant, pretty, sympathetic girl, top in her class in nurse’s training, the disastrous marriages, the helpful teenage children, handsome as herself, all this has won his heart.
He knows he mustn’t say anything to Cam about her mother.
He picks up her hand. They recognize themselves again as lovers. They lie together on the bed. There’s not much time. When they are finished they hold each other, stroke each other’s backs with languid fingers. As if they had all the time in the world.
And then, behind her eyes, Cam sees her mother’s face. She is thinking of herself as a child, this kind of torpid summer day. She is thinking of herself in her serious and heavy single braid, sitting alone in the small room behind the curtain of her mother’s shop. Her mother is grateful for her quietness, proud of it; she shows it off to other women, customers and employees, as if it were a talent whose cultivation she had fostered and paid money to develop.
He knows she’s thinking about her mother. He can recognize it now, the wall that drops between them, the door that shuts. He can never ask her about her mother; whatever she tells him he has to pretend to agree with, even if he thinks she’s wrong. He made two mistakes with her; he won’t make them again. Once he tried to defend her mother’s dependence on her, saying it was hard for Magdalene, she was afraid. Cam gave him a cold look. “That’s right, the slaveholders were afraid too, weren’t they? Frightened to death behind those fucking white columns, weren’t they? Chattering their teeth against their julep cups.”
“All right,” he says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.”
“You’ll never understand,” she said bitterly. “No one will.”
He felt himself shut out, as she had shut him out another time—but that time he didn’t know why. They were talking about their favorite topic—the differences between the Irish and the Jews. “Of course we thought the Irish were a bunch of crazy drunks,” he said. “God, I remember a song my grandfather used to sing. ‘Shikker Is a Goy.’ ”
He sang in Yiddish, then translated for her. The drunk is a goy, he sang, thinking she was amused, the goy is a drunk. The goy is a miserable drunk because he’s a goy.
The look she gave him froze his heart. “Very funny,” she said. “Know any coon songs, any wop songs, any chink songs? Maybe you could sing for the KKK picnic. You’d be a great hit.”
Only a year later, one night when she told him about the mother’s nighttime calls, to her grandmother, her aunt, told him about her running up and down the stairs with her hands over her ears saying, “Hang up, mother, hang up, it’s late, they’re tired, please hang up,” did he understand what he’d done. He held her and he let her cry, fearing that later she’d be angry that he’d seen her that way. But she hadn’t. Only one other time she told him something about her past that made her cry. About her hysterectomy. About how her mother didn’t visit her in the hospital, about how her grandmother smuggled in food, how her grandfather cried one night in the chair across from her when he thought she was asleep. He often wants to comfort her; he wants to tell her he’s the person who can comfort her. But he knows he can’t say it. That’s why he likes to give her all this food; he wants to make her happy.
He wonders if she knows how much he’d like to live with her. He can’t press her, he understands she’d see it as a burden, his desire, which is not unequivocal, not constant: he admits it to himself.
Many nights in his bed, mornings alone eating a solitary breakfast, he yearns for her with a racking pain. But many days—his days of sixteen-hour work—he is relieved that he can put her from his mind and that she isn’t waiting—for his conversation, pleasantness, for the vacation he will never take with her (his holidays are for his children, who are both away at college). He’s grateful that he needn’t think of her out shopping for the prettifying and domesticating object that will become, in time, the source of reproach. Grateful that with her he needn’t engage in conversations over re-doing the bathroom, over swatches of material, glassware, china. He is terrified of the imperialistic life of women in a house. She doesn’t live like that. She talks to him about the world; they’re interested in it. Her hunger is to change the world, not the house. He remembers his anguished attempts to satisfy those domestic hungers in his wives: the time he bought a child’s paintbrush and spent a week painting antique molding a quarter-inch at a time. He recalls agonized trips to paintshops, wallpaper books that blurred before his eyes. “Anything you like, darling, is fine.” To which they’d answer, “Admit it, you don’t give a shit. Admit you just don’t give a shit.” The women’s tears, his guilt: Why do I fail to be a normal man inhabiting a house? Sometimes he’s glad that Cam has her own house and leaves him in his, which he need never think about, where he can come only to bathe and sleep.
Cam begins to get up. “Don’t,” he says, stroking her back. “We have a little more time.”
She gives herself up to what she really wants. She puts her head on his shoulder. This wanting to be beside him, which has become a physical need with her, like the need for food or sleep, frightens her sometimes. But now she isn’t frightened. She lays her head on his shoulder. She thinks: “I don’t even remember who I was before him. Someone different, someone strange to me now, someone not knowing what I know.” She thinks, �
�If we weren’t together, something in me, what can I call it, something, would be shot dead.”
3
IMAGINING HER GRANDPARENTS AT her age, adjusting a tube attached to her grandmother’s nose, and dreamy in her competence, Marilyn thinks: It’s probably too late for me to have an ordinary life.
She thinks about the body of her grandmother. Light now, the bones nearly visible, the sparse hair having long ago given up its springiness, its luster, and its weight, this body that has long ago dissociated itself from the spiritual is itself a dying animal, and seems now to Marilyn to stand for something rather than to have its own existence.
She remembers once opening her grandparents’ kitchen door. Vincent was kneeling on the floor in front of Ellen, who was in a chair. He was holding her bare foot in his hand. He was cutting her toenails. On the kitchen floor there was a blue enamel basin filled with soapy water. She must have soaked her feet in that, taken her foot out of the basin only moments before.
He was holding her foot in his hand. He was drying it with a white towel. In a leather case on the chair where she was sitting were ivory-handled scissors and a series of small knives.
Marilyn stood in the doorway and watched them. Silent. Frightened. Not knowing why she should leave yet feeling she was witnessing something she should not. She was frozen in the locked stare of the transgressor, hypnotized by what she must not see. She knew that she was looking on her first intimate act.
Ellen’s back was towards her, Vincent was kneeling, concentrating on Ellen’s foot; he didn’t know Marilyn was in the room.
She saw by Ellen’s back that she was suddenly alert. Silently, Ellen tapped Vincent. Vincent got up from his knees. She put her stockings on. He dried the little knives and scissors on the towel.
Ellen said, through furious clenched teeth, “What were you doing coming in like that?”
“It’s all right for her,” Vincent said.
But Marilyn knew it wasn’t all right. She was ashamed of herself. And ashamed for them, doing this in the daylight. She thought her grandmother would stop liking her. She only liked her a little, but even that could stop. In liking Dan and Cam, it was as if Ellen had used up a pile of coins, unable to be replaced. She wasn’t nice to Sheilah, but all right with John. She always liked boys better. Marilyn saw this and accepted it as she accepted what she knew about her own mother. She knew her mother disliked all her children, but as the oldest, because her mother was less tired when she was more needy, she believed she had suffered least. Their father loved them, and their grandfather. But that wasn’t enough. They all knew it was second best. Ellen had liked her a little; she was terrified of losing that.