by Jane Smiley
Ellen says, “Then why is the history of mankind the history of travel? It seems to me that humans organize their societies in two ways—either as nomadic ones, where everyone walks thousands of miles in his lifetime, or as settlements that everyone flees and then returns to. I think humans are genetically programmed to go. Simply to go until the batteries are dead.”
“It’s the eyes,” says Joe from his corner. “Your eyes make you think that you are somewhere where you really aren’t. I mean, think about it. A man is walking down the stairs. At the bottom is the front door. He sees the front door, and his car outside, and because he sees them, in his mind he is already there, he has already walked down the stairs, even though he is still walking down them. A piece of carpet is loose. His foot, which is exactly where it is in time and space, catches on the carpet and he falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. He has been fatally deceived by the illusion that your eyes always cast over you, which is that THERE is more important than HERE, and, since time and space are the same thing, the future is more important than now.”
Jerry says, “I would still like to see it.”
Me, too.
I say, “Would you prefer not to have seen it?” Michael looks at me for a long time—not at me, really, but at his own thought. We all look at him, waiting. He says, “I would prefer not to be shaped by experiences. I would like to just have them, not to incorporate them.” He sighs.
“You’d like to be a computer, then,” says Joe.
It turns out that Jennifer spends the night, although she spent the night last night. When Ellen calls her mother, the woman says, “Oh, fine.”
And now it is after nine. We are sitting on the back deck. Joe and Michael, between whom I can still see a stiffness, and Jerry and Ellen, ditto, are drinking beer. I am having another glass of wine, and no one has spoken for about five minutes. There is no light except the ambient light of the city spread out above us. I can see their figures, rather bluish, distributed around me, and hear their movements. Ellen says, idly, “Okay, Mom, why did you grin in the kitchen?”
I admit I am startled. This conversation seems more appropriate to the kitchen, to just Ellen and myself. Except, of course, that she doesn’t know what I was grimacing about, and she thinks this is a way to twit me, maybe, something she likes to do. I can’t say I don’t know. I can say something general—about desire, maybe, about how if a person wants something enough there is always room for it. She knows I think desire is the only motivation. Or I could make up a story about someone at work, some woman with a job and a bunch of kids and a husband and a lover on the side. She goes without lunch, she goes without noontime aerobics, she picks up her kids half an hour later at the day-care center. She is rigidly alert, the way I was. I could make her live, make them laugh at her, the way Joe and Michael laughed at the Shoe Man. She’s dressed a little better every day than she used to be, wearing a little more makeup, so focused and attentive that her work is not only always done, her desk is always neat. She straightens it compulsively, doesn’t she? A new life is coursing through her unlike any previous life—this time she is married, and what she feels is compounded equally of terror and desire. I could say she knows what I know but didn’t know twenty years ago, that both the terror and the desire will be fulfilled, and equally. This woman is suddenly so real to me that thinking of her here in the dark has an odd effect. I think, why not? Why not tell them? They are grown up now, have had passions of their own. I’ve never told anyone what it was like with Ed, and what happened to it. Ellen is right. Though honest, I have also always been secretive. Or, no, I have not always been secretive. I used to be reserved, and then, twenty years ago, I became secretive.
Silhouetted against the silver of the house, Joe tips up his beer and takes the last drops. All summer he has been after me to fill in blanks for him, but only certain blanks. He does think that I am sexless, in that motherish way, and he dismisses me for it, the way men always dismiss women whom they don’t imagine to be objects of desire. Well, I have let him, haven’t I? Pat remarried a beautiful young woman, produced more young children in his forties. But my great passion was buying a house, and I acted as if Simon were primarily a handyman and never kissed him in front of the children. And Ellen. Our comfort together, our sense of kinship, is made up of children, cooking, gossip about the bookstore and the office, but never this. I know she assumes that our parting was Pat’s fault. I say, in a voice as idle as Ellen’s, “My experience is that you make room for anything you want, if you want it enough. Even an inconvenient man.”
Ellen’s head turns, and she says, “Yeah?” but the men do not move. Her eyes are dark, and I can’t tell if they say “Go on” or if they say “Don’t.” I go on. I say, “I made room for Ed.”
Joe says, “Who was Ed? I don’t remember an Ed.”
“Ed was the third point of the triangle that ended my marriage with your father. He lived down the road, in the old farmhouse that had been on the property before it was subdivided.”
“In the country?” says Joe. He speaks of the country, as always, in golden, longing tones.
“Yes. I met him because he had an old horse that he used to ride bareback up and down the lane. I used to ride bareback in Nebraska, so once we got to talking about horses. He was a writer, though. Edward Stackhouse.”
Ellen says, “I’ve heard of him.”
“Mmm,” I say. “It was an old horse, very swaybacked. Came with the farmhouse. He used to stop when Michael and Joe and I were walking down the lane, and put Michael up in front of him. Joe didn’t want to, ever.”
Joe says, “Was it a white horse?”
“Very light dappled gray, yes. Ed used to laugh at everything I said. He would stop, and I would stop what I was doing, and we would talk. Then we talked longer. His eyes were a strange color, kind of a Federal blue. He’d been everywhere, even though he was still in his twenties. His wife had left him, so I think we made a lovely picture for him, twins, remodeling, lawns and gardens, dinner at seven, very Kennedyesque. He made a lovely picture, too. Austere, solitary, artistic. He’d worked for some of Kennedy’s speech writers, and now he was working on some sort of White House book. I couldn’t stay away from him.”
At this, there is an assortment of little noises—a laugh from Michael, a grunt from Joe. From Ellen, a little exhalation, sharp but nearly inaudible. As I speak, I remember more. Nothing can stop me now.
“All he ever had in the house was coffee. I didn’t drink coffee before or after that, but I always did with him. He made it for me, very creamy and sweet.”
“Where were we?” says Michael.
“At first you were always with me, but then the summer came, and your father put the older kids in day camp and you into nursery school three mornings a week. I was never really sure he would be glad to see me if I came without you, so, even when we were sleeping together and our meetings were regular, I would make up some little excuse for coming down the lane. That part was crazy.”
“That part?” says Ellen.
“Well, yes. I mean, I knew I was expected, but even so I always had to bring something, some flowers or a loaf of bread, like a hostess gift, and then, when we began to undress one another, I always had to pretend to myself that I hadn’t been thinking of that, or that this body that was appearing out of my clothes was a big surprise to me.”
“Sounds like love, Ma,” says Michael.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t excitement like that. It felt most like some fixed, inconsolable longing. It was constant, even when I was at his place. I would go over there, and it would stop the moment I saw him, but only that moment. After that there was so much that he was holding back from me that I was as filled with longing when I was with him as when I wasn’t. After we made love, he would sleep and I would lie there wondering what you kids were doing at camp and nursery school.”
Joe says, “Sounds upbeat, Ma. Sounds life-affirming.” His voice is subdued.
“Did Daddy hav
e the place under surveillance?” says Ellen. “Were you being followed by two German men in a black van?”
“He didn’t suspect until I told him. Maybe that was the most important thing about it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I was seeing Ed and I didn’t want to stop. But I did stop. The relationship didn’t outlast the marriage.”
Michael says, “Why did you tell him?”
“Well, the whole affair was a terrible strain, for one thing.” They are staring at me, which makes this explanation seem trivial. I suppose all the explanations I’ve considered over the past twenty years seem trivial, in light of the consequences. I begin the self-justification—“I didn’t know what—I thought—” but I can’t bear it. I look from one to another.
Finally, I say, “I wanted him to know I wasn’t his.” Such a little thing, with them looking at me like this.
After a moment Jerry says, “So this Ed, what happened to him?”
“About a week after Pat took everyone to England, he said he wouldn’t see me or speak to me again. He was a very absolute sort of person. Sometimes I saw him around, but he kept to his word. He never spoke to me again.”
“Why?”
“I wrote and asked him that a couple of times. He didn’t answer. I thought then that he was just cruel, or that he hated me. I couldn’t explain it any other way. After that I thought that he must have been afraid of me and of what he’d done.”
Michael says, “How long did it take you to get over it?”
“I stopped loving Ed about a year later. Really stopped. Didn’t even recognize him at Kroger’s. But I don’t think I ever got over it. Every time I ever got interested in anyone after that, I felt such conflicting feelings of desire and defeat that it was too frightening. Even with Simon. I could have gotten closer to Simon, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t let go beyond a certain point without wanting to kill myself.”
“Wanting to kill yourself?” Michael seems to assert some kind of primacy here, as if all of this is more his business than the others’. We trade a glance, and I am not sure what I see there, but it isn’t surprise. I say, “It wasn’t sadness, actually. It was the sense of having been drawn in and drawn in, encouraged to have trust, to open up. Ed loved to talk, for me to talk. That’s mostly what we did. And then it was suddenly gone. It was unaccountable. It was the mystery that made me want to kill myself, not exactly loss. That feeling of opening up got awfully entwined with the feeling of mysterious danger. But look at it—I let myself go, and then I got punished for it. By Ed, and by your father, too. And I thought I deserved it. And I thought I might never see you all again. So, no, I never got over it. I never let go again, because I never wanted to want to kill myself again.” I look at Michael, but he is looking across the yard. I say, after a moment, “I don’t think I loved Ed the most. But it’s not necessarily the ones you love the most that have the most effect on you.”
“So,” says Ellen, “who did you love the most?”
“Oh, your father, I suppose.”
Now Ellen looks at me again, and says, “Come on, Mother, how could you?”
I say, “Well, it’s not because he was the first or anything, or even because I spent the most time with him. He was exciting. Besides, you’re not asking me to compare the feelings I have about him now with feelings I had about others then. You’re asking me to compare one delusion with another.” We all chuckle awkwardly. There is another long silence. I don’t know how the story has affected them, but having told it makes me hollow with fear. It is the way that I have contained it all these years that has given me strength, and now it seems to me that I have risked that. And then Ellen says, “I’ve got a story, too. You want to hear my story?”
Jerry, on the chaise longue, sits up and looks at us. He says, “Does this include a lover?”
“No,” says Ellen. “It includes Daddy, and you’ve heard it before, so why don’t you bring out some more beers?” Jerry gets up. Ellen is looking at me, and when Jerry turns on the kitchen light, I can see her face. Her look is neither confiding nor meditative, but calmly vengeful. Now it is my turn to think, Don’t, to realize that what she meant when she said, “How could you?” was how dare I say I loved Pat the most after all these years, after the abandonment, after the battles and the enmity. She meant, how could I betray her loyalty to me at this late date. Something she is about to say will be my punishment, and I shrink from hearing it, but I am eager, too.
Michael says, “What’s your story?”
Ellen turns to him. “Do you remember Jenny? She was a Dutch girl, about twenty-five, that Daddy brought back with him to the States. She lived with us for about three months and then left?”
“Blonde?” says Michael.
“Yes. Very short. Not much taller than I was at eleven.”
Michael shrugs.
“Evil stepmother?” says Joe.
“Oh, no,” says Ellen. “She was nice enough. She was just a kid. She was always baking cookies and eating them. She couldn’t speak very good English, but she would bake these cookies, and then she and Daniel and I would sit at the kitchen table and just eat them and smile at one another. I think she felt sorry for us, because she knew she could leave Daddy but we couldn’t.”
“So?” says Joe.
Ellen sits back and looks out over the yard. “One day when we were in England, I got up real early and came down into the kitchen, and Daddy was sitting there all dressed up in a suit, drinking a cup of coffee. It was still dark, so it must have been winter. I asked him why he was all dressed up, and he said that he had to rush over to Amsterdam to get Jenny, did I remember Jenny, and bring her back to take care of us, would I like that? Well, I didn’t know, but I knew Holland was across the ocean and farther away than a single day’s trip, so I asked if we were going along, and he said no, Mrs. Frith, the daily woman, was going to look after us during the day. And I said, ‘Well, who’s going to look after us at night?’ and he said, ‘It will only be one night, and this is England, and you are nearly eleven, and Daniel is a big boy, and so I think, if you lock the doors and draw the curtains, everything will be fine.’ Pretty soon he finished his coffee and got up and gave me a kiss and left, and I don’t know what he was thinking. What if I hadn’t gotten up so early? What if I had just missed him completely?”
“He wasn’t thinking,” says Joe. “He was following his dick to Holland. That’s what Father used to do.”
“Anyway,” Ellen continues, “pretty soon Annie got up, and I got her dressed and then Daniel and you guys, and I thought that Mrs. Frith would come to take us to our school. We were all ready, dressed and fed, and we sort of sat by the door, waiting, for a long time. But Mrs. Frith didn’t get there until about noon, and so by that time everyone was doing other things, and I didn’t say anything to her about it. She was a very cheery woman, Mrs. Frith, but maybe she drank or thought we were odd because we were Americans, because she never asked anything about it, and at one point I said, ‘Did my father say he was going on a trip?’ and she said, ‘Why no, luv,’ and so I just didn’t say another word. She left about five.
“Well, she had made us something to eat—that was one thing she did when she came—and at six o’clock I dished it up, exactly at six o’clock, because Daddy always liked that kind of precision and I had this sense that if I did everything right he would get back quicker—early enough the next day to take us to school. The funny thing was that no one asked where he was, at least none of the younger kids. But Michael and Joe fought like crazy, yelling and pushing each other and crying, from after dinner until about nine-thirty, when I decided it was bedtime. I did just what Daddy said—I pulled the curtains and locked the door and refused to be afraid. Daniel started reading through his entire comicbook collection that he’d brought with him from the States, for about the tenth time, and Annie kept looking at me, but she didn’t say much and I didn’t volunteer anything.
“The next day I let everybody s
leep late, but I was looking for him from about dawn. Mrs. Frith came and we were all still in our pyjamas, but she didn’t say anything. She did ask where Daddy was, and I said that he had gone to the hospital very early, and left word that we didn’t have to go to school. I was just very embarrassed that he hadn’t come back. She made us put on our clothes, though. By Friday she was more suspicious, but I made up this long story about how he was coming home right after work to take us to Ireland for a week, and I even said that she could call him at the hospital and ask him if she liked, but I knew she wouldn’t because she was very suspicious of the telephone and hated to call anyone up, especially Daddy, who hated to hear from anyone when he was at work.
“Well, I remember that on Friday I became convinced that he wasn’t coming back, and that I was going to have to figure out a way to take care of everyone and pay for everything—Mrs. Frith, for one. I thought all day about how she got paid on Monday, and that when Monday rolled around I wasn’t going to have anything to pay her, much less pay the rent or buy food, and all Friday I was kind of rigid with fear. Michael and Joe were terrible again—fighting and running around and I thought really hurting each other—and Daniel kept saying that everybody had to get outside and go to the park. Annie was very subdued, for which I was grateful, but I was afraid that she would start crying.