The children insisted on throwing a birthday party for her, though she tried to head them off. When Nate lived here they'd celebrated her birthday in the morning, simply, with presents only. Parties were for children, she'd told them, and Nate had backed her up. But this year they went the whole hog. They seemed to think it would cheer her up. It was supposed to be a surprise, but she knew what was coming as soon as Nancy, elaborately and casually, suggested after lunch that she take an afternoon nap.
"But I'm not tired, darling," she said.
"Yes, you are. You've got big bags under your eyes."
"Please, Mother," Janet said. Janet has lately begun to call her "Mother" instead of "Mum." Elizabeth wonders if that tone of weary, superior exasperation has been copied from her.
She climbed the stairs to her room, where she lay on the bed drinking Scotch and reading English Tapestry Through the Ages. If they were preparing a surprise, she would have to be surprised.
At five Janet brought her a cup of undrinkably bitter tea and ordered her to come downstairs when she heard three whistles. She tiptoed to the bathroom to pour out the tea; returning, she could hear them arguing in the kitchen. She creamed her face and put on a black cotton blouse and the pearl pin she knew Janet considered elegant. When she heard Nancy's feeble whistles, she tightened the corners of her mouth, widened her eyes, and negotiated the stairs, holding on to the banister. Nude descending the staircase, in cunning fragments. Stewed, descending the staircase. But she wasn't really drunk. Tiddly, said Uncle Teddy.
They'd lit candles in the kitchen and looped pink and blue streamers with teddybears on them around the walls. "Happy Birthday, Mum," Nancy shrieked. "This is a surprise!"
Janet stood beside the cake, hands decorously folded. The cake was on the table. It had three candles on one corner and nine on the opposite one, "Because if we put thirty-nine on we couldn't get them all on," said Nancy. The writing, in impeccable baker's script surrounded with bridal wreaths of pink sugar roses, said "Happy Birthday Mother."
Elizabeth, who hadn't expected to be moved, sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and locked her smile into place. Lockjaw. This was the shadow of all the birthday parties she'd never been given. Her own mother had either forgotten or found her birth no cause for celebration, though there would be presents, remorsefully, days after the event. Auntie Muriel, on the other hand, had always remembered, but had made it the occasion for a solemn presentation of some large or costly item, something that radiated guilt in advance, that cried out to be scratched, lost, stolen. A bicycle, a watch. Not wrapped.
"Thank you, love," she said, hugging each of the children in turn. "This is the most wonderful birthday I've ever had." She blew out the candles and opened her presents, exclaiming over the lily-of-the-valley talcum powder from Janet and the puzzle from Nancy that required to have its three white balls and three black balls jiggled into their respective holes. Nancy is good at such puzzles.
"Where's your present from Dad?" Nancy asked. "He said he was giving you one."
"I guess he just forgot this year, darling," Elizabeth said. "I'm sure he'll remember it later."
"I don't understand that," Janet said reflectively. "He gave us the money for the cake."
Nancy burst into tears. "We weren't supposed to tell!" She ran from the room; Elizabeth heard her wailing up the stairs.
"She's been under a strain lately," Janet said in that adult voice Elizabeth finds so hard to bear. She followed sedately, leaving Elizabeth alone with an uneaten cake and a small pile of crumpled wrapping paper.
She cut the cake and filled two plates, then carried them upstairs, prepared to stroke and comfort. She entered the children's room and sat, rubbing Nancy's damp back as she lay face down on her bed. It was far too hot. She could feel sweat condensing on her upper lip, in the hollows at the backs of her knees.
"She's just showing off," Janet said. She was sitting on the other twin bed, nibbling a sugar rose. "There's nothing wrong with her really."
Elizabeth put her head down to Nancy's when the choking noises had subsided.
"What is it, love?"
"You and Dad don't love each other any more."
Oh hell, Elizabeth thought. He set this up. I should let him cope with it. Just stick them in a taxi and send them over. "I know it makes you unhappy that your father doesn't live here with us any more," she said carefully, correctly. "We felt it would be better for all of us if we lived apart for a while. Your father loves you both very much. Your father and I will always love each other too, because both of us are your parents and we both love you. Now sit up and eat your lovely cake, like a good girl."
Nancy sat up. "Mummy," she said, "are you going to die?"
"Sometime, darling," Elizabeth said. "But not right now."
Janet came to sit on the other side of Elizabeth. She wanted to be hugged, so Elizabeth hugged her.
Mummy. A dried corpse in a gilded case. Mum, silent. Mama, short for mammary gland. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed. If you didn't want trees sucking at your sweet flowing breast why did you have children? Already they're preparing for flight, betrayal, they will leave her, she will become their background. They will discuss her as they lie in bed with their lovers, they will use her as an explanation for everything they find idiosyncratic or painful about themselves. If she makes them feel guilty enough they'll come and visit her on weekends. Her shoulders will sag, she will have difficulty with shopping bags, she will become My Mother, pronounced with a sigh. She will make them cups of tea and without meaning to but unable to stop will pry, pry like a small knife into their lives.
She doesn't mean to now; she does now. Those careful questions about the other house: What were they given for dinner? How late did they stay up? Did they have a good time? And the equally careful answers. They can sense it's a trap. If they say they like the other house, household, she'll be hurt; if not, she will be angry. "It was all right," they say, avoiding her eyes, and she despises herself for placing them there, making them shift and evade. She wants them to be happy. At the same time she wants to hear of injuries, atrocities, so she can virtuously rage.
She brushes her hair, her face in the mirror a flat plaque. Leaden. She's making it too easy for him, he has it too easy. He isn't the one who has to wipe the noses and wake up in the middle of the night because his children are screaming in their sleep. If she even told him about that, he'd think she was using emotional blackmail. She tips back her glass; reddish brown slides down her throat.
It isn't Lesje she resents. Let him screw whatever he likes, why should she care? It's his freedom she can't take. Free as a goddamned bird, while she's locked in this house, locked into this house while the roof leaks and the foundation crumbles and the earth revolves and leaves fall from the calendars like snow. In the centers of her bones dark metal smolders.
She sits down on the edge of her bed, staring at her crossed wrists, the blue veins where they branch and river. Every second a pulsebeat, countdown. She could lie down with candles at her head and feet. Thirty-nine of them. She could stop time. Wristwatch.
With an effort she turns her hand over. It's eleven-thirty.
She checks the children's room. They're both asleep, breathing evenly. She goes back along the hall, intending to go to bed; but instead she finds herself putting on her shoes. She doesn't know what she is going to do.
Elizabeth stands in the hot night outside Nate's new house, Nate's old house, which she's never seen before. Although of course she's had the address and the telephone number. In case of emergencies. Perhaps this is an emergency. The house is dark except for a dim light in the upper window. The bedroom.
She'd wanted to see it, that's all. Make it enter her head so she can believe in its existence. (A dump, a slum; probably cockroaches. This tattiness pleases her; the house is much worse than her own.) But she goes quietly up the front steps and tries the door. She isn't sure what she'll do if it's open. Creep up the stairs, fling open the bedroom door a
s in some antique melodrama? But the front door is securely locked.
They've locked her out. They're ignoring her, giggling in the bedroom while she stands down here in the night, discarded, invisible. She will make a mark: a brick through the window, her initials on the door? She has nothing to write with. Should she kick over the garbage can, litter trash on the porch, scream? Look at me, I'm here, you can't get rid of me that easily.
But she can't scream; her voice has been stolen. The only power she has left is negative.
Suddenly she thinks: What if they look out the window and see me standing down here? Her face is flushed, the skin under her blouse is wet and prickling; her hair sticks to her neck. Disheveled, a disheveled cliche. They will laugh. She turns quickly away from the house and begins to walk north, sober now, annoyed with herself for having allowed herself to be led to this ignominious, this vacant street.
And worse: where are the children? Locked in the house, alone. Ladybird, ladybird. She's never left them alone like this before. She thinks of fires, of murderous climbers, silhouetted against their open window. Gross negligence. But if the children die it will be in a way Nate's fault. On her birthday; an obscure revenge.
Even to think this terrifies her. She thinks instead of the cake, the candles. Little Nancy Etticoat, in a white petticoat and a red nose. And Nancy, looking at the picture of the melting woman in the Little Riddle Book, said, Is that me? Pleased to be in a book. She was much younger then.
"If you blow out all the candles at once," Nancy said, "you'll get your wish." Nancy doesn't yet know about wishes, their danger. The longer she lives, the shorter she grows.
PART FIVE
Saturday, September 3, 1977
NATE
This is it. Nate has spent several months avoiding this. He would rather be doing anything else at all. He has a brief vision of himself on a balsa raft, floating down the Amazon with malarial steam rising around him. A crocodile, or would it be an alligator, raises its head from the murky green water, stinking like a dead snake, hissing, lunging for him. Deftly he inserts a stick between its open jaws, twists and it's helpless, it falls astern and he floats serenely on, sunburned and emaciated but not done yet, not by a long shot. He wishes he hadn't lost his pith helmet in that skirmish. He's on his way to discover something, or perhaps he's already discovered it. A lost civilization. In his back pocket is a creased and water-stained map, which will be the only clue if the poisoned arrows get him. Delirious, he'll be. If he can only reach Lima. He tries vainly to remember which side of South America Lima is really on. A miracle of endurance, they will say.
But the pressure, the unavoidable vortex has him at last and he's being swept along, out of control, towards some chasm he can dimly perceive. He tries not to panic, though he can feel his eyes jerking, making the room flicker like an old film. He concentrates on his Adam's apple. He refuses to gulp, she'd spot that in a flash. He uncrosses his legs and crosses them again, left over right, the first step in a Boy Scout reef knot. There's nothing to drink but bloody tea, there isn't even a beer, and he knows for absolute goddamn certain that this is deliberate on Elizabeth's part. She thought it would unsettle him and she's right, right, right.
It's the mention of lawyers that's confused him. At the first words, "my lawyer," she said, and "your lawyer," he started shallow breathing. He knows he used to be a lawyer himself. Who should know better than he does that there's no mystery, no occult power? It's all paper and verbiage. But fake though the structure is, it could wreck his life.
"Couldn't we do it without lawyers?" he asks, and Elizabeth smiles.
She's placed herself on the sofa, where she's curled with every show of comfort. He, on the other hand, is sitting on a pine pressback chair, from which, he notes, the cushion has been removed since the last time he was here. His ass hurts, bone against wood, his spine hurts, this chair was always too low for him.
"You can't have a divorce without lawyers," she says.
Nate begins to explain that there is in fact a way of doing it, but she stops him. "That would hardly be fair," she says. "You know the law, I don't. I feel I need protection."
Nate is hurt. Protection from him? It's a question of support for the children. She ought to know he will do anything he can.
She has a piece of paper, which she passes over to him. She hopes he will realize she's tried to be more than fair. She talks about dentists' bills while Nate focuses with an effort on the black marks in front of him. The children are upstairs watching television in their room, where Elizabeth has sent them. For several weeks she hasn't let him come into the house when he's arrived to pick them up for the weekend. He's had to lurk outside, once in the rain, like some pervert or magazine salesman, waiting for them to emerge from the front door with their pathetic little overnight cases. It was part of her campaign, part of the squeeze to get him into this corner where he now crouches. When he walked through the door today, Nancy thought at first that he was moving in again. Home.
He must make it clear to Elizabeth that he will not tolerate having the children used as weapons against him. (Make it clear, a joke. What power does he have, how does he know what she says to them when he isn't there?)
"Mummy says single-parent families have to work harder and pull together," Nancy told him last week.
"You aren't a single-parent family," Nate said. Elizabeth was behaving as if he were dead. But he wasn't dead yet and he wasn't going to die to oblige her. Unlike Chris. In the past few weeks he's felt a growing kinship with Chris, with that fatal desperation. "You have two parents and you always will have."
"Not if Mummy dies," Nancy said. Nate wants to talk to Elizabeth about this, this theme which has come up more than once. Has she been taking pills, has she been slashing her wrists where the children can see? Nate doesn't think so, doesn't think she'd go that far to spite him. She isn't looking well, she's puffy and white but she's neatly dressed and, though he looks, he can see no bandages or scars.
He knows what will happen if he tries to discuss the children's state of mind. He can foresee the scorn: What right does he have to comment? He's opted out. She acts as if he's gone off to loll in flowers and roll around on carpets of naked women, when the fact is he spends most of his life scrabbling for money. The recession hasn't ended. Maybe, he thinks, peering at Elizabeth's neatly typed list, he should point this out. For the first few years of it people believed it would, but now they've buckled themselves in for the long siege. They're no longer willing to pay eighty dollars for Jerome Giraffe and Horace Horse, no matter how lovingly handcrafted. As for naked women, Lesje is hardly speaking to him. She claims he's deliberately trying to postpone the divorce.
"It's just a formality," he told her. "It doesn't mean anything."
"It may not mean anything to you," she said, "but Elizabeth thinks she's still married to you. Which she is."
"Only on paper," Nate said.
"If it doesn't mean anything to you, why not do it and get it over with?" Lesje said. Nate feels she is unhealthily obsessed with this question. A minor question, he tells her. He's tried to explain to her several times that relationships of ten years' standing (eleven? twelve?) don't just come to a dead stop. Elizabeth is the mother of his children. It's true she asked him to come over and help hang the new curtains in the children's room and it's also true he went; perhaps he shouldn't have. But that was a month and a half ago; he doesn't see why Lesje keeps bringing it up. They love each other, he tells her; who cares what's on file in the Registry Office? But Lesje turns away from him in bed, curling in on herself. Or she stays late at the Museum, or she brings home thick books filled with diagrams of fossil teeth and reads them at the kitchen table until she thinks he'll be asleep.
"Dinosaurs are dead," he said to her one day, trying to lighten things up. "But I'm still alive."
"Are you sure?" she said, with one of those ball-shriveling looks. As if he was a teeny little dog turd.
It's this, this desert, this growin
g fiasco, that has driven him finally into Elizabeth's mushroom-colored parlor. Her net.
He has a swift desire to stand up, lean over her, put his hands around her neck and squeeze. There would be some satisfaction in that. His mother has taken to saying that men should be protective of the rights of women; Nate can see this in the abstract. He knows about seamstresses, cookie workers, female university teachers, rape. But in concrete cases like his he sees no need for it. He is the one, surely it's obvious, who needs protection.
He resorts to an amusement of his high-school days, when he would practice silent metamorphoses on his teachers. Hocus pocus, and Elizabeth is a giant white sponge. Presto change-o, she's a big vanilla pudding. Abracadabra, a set of mammoth false teeth. Kapow, and she has bubonic plague. The mother of his children gasps, turns mottled and purpled, swells and bursts. He'll have the carpet cleaned, her carpet, and that will be that.
"Don't you agree?" Elizabeth says.
His eyes jerk from the page; he forces himself to look at her. Eye contact with the jury, so they were taught, always a good thing. He knows it will be dangerous to say, "Of course," so he'll have to admit he hasn't been listening.
"About the dentists' bills?" he asks hopefully.
Elizabeth gives him again her tolerant smile. "No," she says. "About the co-respondents. I was saying it would be better if I divorce you rather than the other way around, since it wouldn't be very good to use Chris as a co-respondent."
Nate wants to ask why not, since Chris is unlikely to be bothered by it. Whereas he can foresee certain difficulties with Lesje. But he knows this would be a tactless question. Also, the point in law is dubious. Though Elizabeth could swear she committed adultery, there's nothing but hearsay to back her up.
She says it would be bad for the children to drag the whole thing up again. She's right, of course she's right; everything these days, it seems, is bad for the children.
"I don't know," Nate says slowly. "Maybe we shouldn't use those grounds at all. Maybe we should go for marriage breakdown. That's a little more accurate, wouldn't you say?"