Did my children sense the frivolity of our Easter priesthoods? The youngest used to lie in her bed in the smallest of the upstairs rooms and suck her thumb and stare past me at something in the dark. Our house, in her, did surely possess the dimension of dread that imprints every surface on the memory, that makes each scar on the paint a clue to some terrible depth. She was the only child who would talk about death. Tomorrow was her birthday. ‘I don’t want to have a birthday. I don’t want to be nine.’
‘But you must grow. Everybody grows. The trees grow. ’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Don’t you want to be a big girl like Judith?’
‘No.’
‘Then you can wear lipstick, and a bra, and ride your bicycle even on Central Street.’
‘I don’t want to ride on Central Street.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then I will get to be an old old lady and die.’
And her tears well up, and the man with her is dumb, as all the men ever with her will be on this point dumb, in this little room where nothing remains of us but scuffmarks and a half-scraped Snoopy decal on the window frame. If we still lived here, it would be time to put the screens in the windows.
Crocuses are up at the old house; daffodils bloom at the new. The children who had lived in the new house before us left Superballs under the radiators for us to find. In the days of appraisal and purchase, we used to glimpse these children skulking around their house, behind bushes and banisters, gazing at us, the usurpers of their future. In the days after they moved out but before our furniture moved in, we played hilarious games in the empty rooms – huge comic ricochets and bounces. Soon the balls became lost again. The rooms became crowded. We had moved in.
Tenderly, musingly, the plumber shows me a sawed-off section of the pipe that leads from the well to our pressure tank. The inside diameter of the pipe is reduced to the size of his finger by mineral accretions – a circle of stony layers thin as rolled-up paper. It suggests a book seen endwise, but one of those books not meant to be opened, that priests wisely kept locked. ‘See,’ he says, ‘this has built up over forty, fifty years. I remember my dad and me putting in the pump, but this pipe was here then. Nothing you can do about it, minerals in the water. Nothing you can do about it but dig it up and replace it with inch-and-a-quarter, inch-and-a-half new.’
I imagine my lawn torn up, the great golden backhoe trampling my daffodils, my dollars flooding away. Ineffectually, I protest.
The plumber sighs, as poets do, with an eye on the audience. ‘See, keep on with it like this, you’ll burn out your new pump. It has to work too hard to draw the water. Replace it now, you’ll never have to worry with it again. It’ll outlast your time here.’
My time, his time. His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow. We push out through the bulkhead; a blinding piece of sky slides into place above us, fitted with temporary, timeless clouds. All around us, we are outlasted.
THE RED-HERRING THEORY
THE PARTY WAS OVER. Their friends had come, shuffled themselves, been reshuffled, worn thin with the evening and then, papery post-midnight presences, had conjured themselves out the door. The Maples were left with each other and a profusion of cigarette butts and emptyish glasses. The dishes were stacked dirty in the kitchen, the children slept in innocence upstairs. Still, the couple, with the hysterical after-energy of duty done, refused to go to bed but instead sat in a living room grown suddenly hollow and huge.
‘What messy people,’ Joan said, perched upright in a director’s chair of natural wood and green canvas. ‘Grinding Fritos into a shag rug. They’re so sloppy.’ Richard saw that she was in a judgmental mood; her pronouncements, when she was in this mood, fascinated him.
‘Isn’t that how we act,’ he asked, sprawled on the off-white sofa, its pillows battered by a succcession of bodies, ‘when we go out?’ The seats they had chosen placed Joan higher, and displayed to his view the admirable clean line of her jaw.
‘Not at all,’ she said positively. ‘We clean up what we spill. We always leave together, too.’
‘That was odd,’ Richard agreed. ‘Do you think Jim was sick, or mad?’
‘Maybe he was so mad it made him sick.’
‘Was he mad at me?’
‘Well,’ Joan said, ‘you did keep dancing with her, even after he put on his overcoat.’
‘Surely a suburban man,’ was the languid reply of her husband, who in his adolescence had seen a number of Mr and Mrs North movies, ‘has the right to dance with his mistress.’
Joan’s reply was enviably firm: ‘Marlene is not your mistress. She’s your red herring.’
‘My red herring?’ The unforeseen phrase tinted Marlene’s skin exotically; again, she was in his arms, but slipperier, a mermaid, a scaly smelly merperson. She had been loaded to the gills with perfume.
‘Sure,’ Joan said. ‘The properly equipped suburban man, as you call him, has a wife, a mistress, and a red herring. The red herring may have been his mistress once, or she may become one in the future, but he’s not sleeping with her now. You can tell, because in public they act as though they do.’
Richard leaned into another depressed pillow, protesting, ‘That’s too Machiavellian to be real. That’s decadent, sweetie. Maybe it was a mistake, to bring you out here; we should have stayed on West Thirteenth Street. Remember how the policemen used to gallop by on horses in the snow?’
‘They did that once. Fifteen years ago. The schools were impossible. You couldn’t park the car.’
‘Jesus,’ he agreed, ‘remember the time I parked it in a lot and a roof-mending job on the building next to it spilled tar all over the windshield? It still makes me furious.’ But remembering it made him happy.
‘There you are,’ Joan agreed, ‘we’re stuck,’ meaning the suburbs. ‘Want a little nightcap?’
‘My God, no. How can you stand any more liquor? Do you think I should call Jim up and apologize?’
‘Don’t be silly. You might interrupt something.’
‘I might?’ His perfumed merperson, descaled, in another’s arms? The thought was chilly.
‘It’s possible. Marlene didn’t seem at all fazed when he went out, she went right on being the life of the party.’
Richard shifted back to the first pillow and changed the subject. ‘Poor Ruth,’ he said, ‘didn’t seem to have a very good time.’
Joan rose, regal in her high-waisted, floor-length, powder-blue party dress, and seized the brandy bottle on the piano; its long neck became a sceptre in her hand. She took up a dirty snifter, tossed its residue into the fireplace, listened to the sizzle, and poured herself a tawny, chortling slug. ‘Poor Ruth,’ she repeated carefully, seating herself again in the director’s chair.
‘Of course,’ Richard amplified, ‘why should she have a good time, with that jerk for a husband?’
‘Jerry’s not such a jerk,’ Joan said. ‘He’s a lovely dancer, for one thing. A good athlete. There’s a lot you could learn from him.’
‘No doubt.’ He thought the subject should be changed back again. ‘If Marlene’s just my red herring,’ he asked, ‘why did she dance with me so long?’
‘Maybe you’re hers. We can have red herrings too, you know. Women’s lib.’
‘Then who’s Marlene really seeing?’
‘Jerry?’
‘Impossible.’
‘Why are you so sure?’
‘Because he’s such a jerk. All he can do is talk stocks, throw the football, and dance.’ Every time, that fall, playing touch football, he had caught a pass thrown from Jerry’s hand, Richard had felt guilt tag him.
Joan’s smile sealed upon a swallow of brandy. ‘A jerk,’ she said, ‘can be a fish.’
‘There are fish in your game too?’
The brandy produced eloquence. ‘What are these boring messy parties for except fishing? If you’ve caught your fish, you go to see him. Or her. If you haven’t yet, you go in hopes
you will. If you don’t fish at all, like the Donnelsons, you go out of fascination, to see who’s catching what. And we need them, too. Like fish need water to swim in.’
‘We? Whose fish are you? You make that brandy look awful good.’
Joan rose and brought the bottle to him, because, Richard figured, she could pour herself another splash on the way, and because she knew she looked better standing up in her queenly dress than sitting down. Sitting down, she looked pregnant. ‘First,’ she responded, having served him and reseated herself, while the front of her waist puffed up in a nostalgic simulation of childbearing, ‘let’s figure out, whose red herring am I?’
‘You were Mack’s,’ Richard ventured, ‘but that seems to have cooled. He was all over Eleanor tonight; do you think they’re going to get remarried?’
‘And waste all those lawyers’ fees?’
‘Jerry’s,’ he tried. ‘You danced with him twice, on and on.’ Irate, truth seeming to dawn, Richard sat up and pointed accusingly. ‘You’re that jerk’s red herring!’
‘I am not,’ Joan replied calmly. ‘Jerry and I talked a long time, but it was about you and Ruth.’
‘Oh. And what did you decide?’
‘That the two of you weren’t doing anything really.’
‘How nice.’ His relief blended with annoyance at her complacent underestimation.
‘If there were something going on,’ Joan continued, ‘you’d speak to each other at least once at a party, for appearances’ sake. As is, you just stare. The question is, are you working up to something? I think so, he doesn’t. He’s very sure of her.’
‘He would be. What a jerk.’
His tone, too vehement, seemed to offend her, in her queenly blue dress. ‘Let’s talk about me,’ Joan said. ‘I’m tired of talking about you.’
‘What about you? Are you fishing?’
‘Do I act it?’
He thought. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’re a flirt, but not a fisherwoman.’
‘You don’t think I have the guts?’
‘You have the guts,’ he said, ‘but not the – the what? The edge. Every time you feel an edge working up, you hit yourself with another slug of brandy and dull it. Like now. This could be a pretty sexy talk; but by the time we get upstairs you’ll be dead. Hey. It just occurred to me why Jim left. It wasn’t my dancing with Marlene at all, nobody gives a damn who their wife dances with. It was your dancing so long with Jerry. Jim is your fish, and you teased him with your red herring.’
‘Don’t let my theory run away with you.’
‘It makes sense. You used to be Mack’s fish, and now you’re his red herring, while he makes up to Eleanor, or is Eleanor his red herring, and – did you notice how much time he spent talking to Linda Donnelson?’
Joan’s face froze, for the briefest moment: the way a gust of wind will suddenly flatten choppy water. ‘Linda? Don’t be silly. They were arguing about low-income housing.’
Why was she defensive? Had she gone back to Mack? Richard doubted this; their affair had cooled as soon as Mack got divorced. It was the mention of the Donnelsons. ‘For that matter,’ he ventured, ‘you don’t seem to think Sam is as boring as you used to.’
‘He is boring. I talked to him because I was the hostess and nobody else would.’
‘He does have a gorgeous body,’ Richard admitted, as if she had asserted this. ‘Once you get below his wooden head.’
‘Is it so wooden?’
‘I don’t know, is it? You’re the one who’s tapping it.’
‘I’m not tapping anything. I’m sitting here looking at you and thinking I don’t like you very much.’
‘That time Sam took us sailing,’ Richard went on, ‘I was struck by what a terrific muscular back he has with his shirt off. Why did he ask us sailing? He knows I have hydrophobia. Whereas you turned out to be a regular little salt, fluttering up there with the jib sheet. How is it, in a boat? Anything like a waterbed? God, sweetie, you have your nerve, bringing up the Donnelsons and telling me what innocent aqua pura they were. So Sam’s your fish. Landed or not. I still can’t figure out who your red herring is, you have so many.’
Her silence frightened him; he became again a little boy begging his mother to speak to him, to rescue him from drowning in the blood-deep currents of her moods, of her secrets. ‘Tell me some more,’ he begged Joan, ‘about why you don’t like me. It’s music to my ears.’
‘You’re cruel,’ she pronounced, the brandy glass resting in her hand like a symbolic orb of power, ‘and you’re greedy.’
‘Now tell me why you like me. Tell me why we shouldn’t get a divorce.’
‘I hate your ego,’ she said, ‘and our sex is lousy, but I’ve never been lonely with you. I’ve never for an instant felt alone when you were in the room.’ Tears made her blink, and close her mouth.
He blinked also, out of weariness. ‘Well that’s a pretty weak endorsement. It won’t sell much of the product in Peoria.’
‘Is that what we’re trying to do? Sell the product in Peoria?’
‘It sure as hell isn’t selling very well here. Except to red herrings and poor fish.’
His attack flustered her, routed her from her throne. ‘You shouldn’t get angry,’ she said, standing, ‘when I try to talk. It doesn’t happen that often.’ She began to collect glasses, and to carry them toward the kitchen.
‘Thank God for that. You’re appalling.’
‘What is it that offends you? That I’m even a little bit alive?’
‘A live for other people, but not for me.’
‘You sounded just like Ruth, saying that. You’ve even caught her self-pity. Come on. Help me clean up this mess.’
‘A mess it is,’ he admitted. But clearing it away, arranging all these receptacles in the racks of the dishwasher and then shepherding them back, spotless, to their allotted spaces in the cupboard, felt like another layer of confusion, a cover-up. Richard stayed on the sofa, trying to see through the tangle to the light. Joan was on to Ruth; that space was gone. There remained one area of opportunity, one way to beat the system; its simplicity made him smile. Sleep with your red herring.
SUBLIMATING
THE MAPLES AGREED that, since sex was the only sore point in their marriage, they should give it up: sex, not the marriage, which was eighteen years old and stretched back to a horizon where even their birth pangs, with a pang, seemed to merge. A week went by. On Saturday, Richard brought home in a little paper bag a large raw round cabbage. Joan asked, ‘What is that?’
‘It’s just a cabbage.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ Her irritability gratified him.
‘You don’t have to do anything with it. I saw Mack Dennis go into the A & P and went in to talk to him about the new environment commission, whether they weren’t muscling in on the conservation committee, and then I had to buy something to get out through the checkout counter, so I bought this cabbage. It was an impulse. You know what an impulse is.’ Rubbing it in. ‘When I was a kid,’ he went on, ‘we always used to have a head of cabbage around; you could cut a piece off to nibble instead of a candy. The hearts were best. They really burned your mouth.’
‘O.K., O.K.’ Joan turned her back and resumed washing dishes. ‘Well, I don’t know where you’re going to put it; since Judith turned vegetarian the refrigerator’s already so full of vegetables I could cry’
Her turning her back aroused him; it usually did. He went closer and thrust the cabbage between her face and the sink. ‘Look at it, darley. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s so perfect.’ He was only partly teasing; he had found himself, in the A & P, ravished by the glory of the pyramided cabbages, the mute and glossy beauty that had waited ages for him to rediscover it. Not since preadolescence had his senses opened so innocently wide: the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter, where the girl, with a flicke
r of surprise, dressed it in a paper bag and charged him thirty-three cents. As he drove the mile home, the secret sphere beside him in the seat seemed a hole he had drilled back into reality. And now, cutting a slice from one pale cheek, he marvelled across the years at the miracle of the wound, at the tender compaction of the leaves, each tuned to its curve as tightly as a guitar string. The taste was blander than his childhood memory of it, but the texture was delicious in his mouth.
Bean, their baby, ten, came into the kitchen. ‘What is Daddy eating?’ she asked, looking into the empty bag for cookies. She knew Daddy as a snack-sneaker.
‘Daddy bought himself a cabbage,’ Joan told her.
The child looked at her father with eyes in which amusement had been prepared. There was a serious warmth that Mommy and animals, especially horses, gave off, and everything else had the coolness of comedy. ‘That was silly,’ she said.
‘Nothing silly about it,’ Richard said. ‘Have a bite.’ He offered her the cabbage as if it were an apple. He envisioned inside her round head leaves and leaves of female psychology, packed so snugly the wrinkles dovetailed.
Bean made a spitting face and harshly laughed. ‘That’s nasty,’ she said. Bolder, brighter-eyed, flirting: ‘You’re nasty.’ Trying it out.