Also, at some level she doesn’t want to make her life any physically easier for herself than it already is; she needs every pitiful ounce of exercise she gets. When she was younger and married, she spent all the morning running around making beds and vacuuming and putting dishes away, but she became so expert she can do these things almost in her sleep; just sleepwalking through a room she makes the beds and tidies things up, though it’s true she doesn’t vacuum the way she once did—the new machines are lighter and she knows are supposed to be more efficient, but she never has the right brush for the end of the hose and finds the little storage compartment the vacuum part carries around inside itself difficult to unlatch; it’s almost like a puzzle putting things together, compared with the old uprights that you just switched on and that set up vacuumed breadths on the carpet like a lawnmower on the lawn, with the sweet little light in front, like a snowplow at night. She hardly noticed any exertion, doing housework. But then she had less weight to move around—it is her cross to bear, her mortification, as religious people used to say.
A lot of her colleagues at the Clifton Library and all the young people who come in and out have cell phones right in their purses or clipped on their belts, but Jack says it’s a racket, the charges add up, like on cable TV, which was something she wanted, not him. The so-called electronic revolution, to hear Jack tell it, has brought about a wealth of schemes for painlessly extracting money from us in monthly charges for services we don’t need, but with cable the picture is certainly clearer—no ghosts, no wobble and twitch—and the choices are so much more there was no comparison; he himself turns on the History Channel some nights. Though he claims books are much better and deeper, he almost never finishes one through. About cell phones he actually told her, right to her face, that he doesn’t want to be reached all the time, especially if he’s in a tutorial—if she has a health emergency she should call 911, not him. This isn’t very subtle. There’s a level, she knows, at which he wouldn’t mind if she were dead. It would be two hundred forty pounds less on his shoulders. On the other hand she knows he will never leave her: his Jewish sense of responsibility and a sentimental loyalty, which must be Jewish too. If you’ve been persecuted and reviled for two thousand years, being loyal to your loved ones is just good survival tactics.
They are special, the Bible wasn’t wrong about that. At work in the library, they make all the jokes and have the ideas. Until she and Jack met at Rutgers, it was as if she had never been touched by human electricity before. The other women he had known, including his mother, must have been very clever. Very Jewish-intellectual. He thought she was funny, so relaxed and light-hearted and, though he never quite said it, naïve. He told her she had grown up wrapped in the Lutheran Daddy-Bear God. He peeled back the covering on her nerves and thrust himself at her; he bore into her, all over, thinner himself then, and full of himself, a born teacher it turned out, glib, quick, thinking he might become a gag writer for Jack Benny, or was it Milton Berle at that point?
Who knows where he is now, out somewhere on this impossibly sticky hot summer day when she can hardly move. She’d rather be at work, where they at least have effective air-conditioning; the one tucked in their bedroom window mostly just makes noise, and he has always begrudged the electricity for one downstairs. Men, they roam, participating in the society. She had always tended to be quiet, certainly next to Hermione, prattling away with her theories and ideals. Their parents drove her crazy, she said, always stodgily accepting whatever the unions and the Democrats and The Saturday Evening Post dished out, whereas Elizabeth found their stodgy passivity comforting. She had always been drawn to quiet places, parks and cemeteries and libraries before they became noisy, some of them even with background music like restaurants, half of what people checked out were tapes and now DVDs. As a girl she had loved living on Pleasant Street, within an easy walk of Awbury Park, so much green space and, a little beyond, the Arboretum off Chew, the weeping beech like a great green igloo around you and her notion of Heaven somehow caught up in the swaying tops of those tall, tall trees, the poplars showing white undersides in the slightest breeze as if there were live spirits inside, you can see how primitive people worshipped trees once. The other direction took you, by the trolley that ran on Germantown Avenue just a block away, to Fairmont Park, which was truly endless, with the Wissahickon flowing through, the stop at the Lutheran Theological Seminary with its sweet old stone buildings and the seminarians so young and handsome and dedicated; you could see them on the walks, in the shade, there wasn’t all this guitar music and women clergymen and talk about same-sex marriages then. The young people in the library talk out like they’re in their own living rooms, it’s the same at the movies, there are no manners any more, television has ruined everybody’s. When she and Jack fly to New Mexico to visit Markie in Albuquerque, the disrespectful way the other passengers wear shorts and what look like pajamas on the plane: television has made people at home now everywhere, not caring how they look, women absolutely as fat as she wearing shorts; they must never look in the mirror.
Working four days a week at the library, she can’t watch enough of the midday serials to follow every twist of the plot, but the plots, three or four plots intertwined the way they do it now, move slowly enough she doesn’t feel left out. It’s become a habit with her lunch, to take the sandwich or the salad, or the microwaved leftovers from a few nights ago, Jack never seems to finish what’s on his plate any more, and for dessert a bit of cheesecake or a few cookies, oatmeal-raisin if she’s on a binge of being virtuous, and settle in the chair and let it wash over her, all the young actors and actresses, usually two or three at a time in one of those sets that look too large, with everything new-bought, to be a real room, with a stagy echo in the air, and that kind of tingling music they all use, not organ music as in the old radio serials but a synthesized, she supposes is the word, sound almost like a harp at moments and then at others like a xylophone with violins, everything on tiptoe to convey suspense. The music underlines the dramatic confessional or confrontational utterances that leave the actors staring at each other in stunned close-up, their eyeballs glazed with sorrow or animosity, little bridges constantly being crossed in the endless lattice of their relationships: “I really don’t give a damn about Kendall’s welfare….” “Surely you knew that Ryannever wanted to have children; he was terrified of the family curse….” “My whole life seems just out of my reach. I don’t know who I am or what I think any more….” “I can see it in your eyes; everybody loves a winner….” “You’ve got to love yourself enough to walk away from that man. Let your mother have him if that’s what she wants—they deserve each other….” “I truly, deeply hate myself….” “I feel lost in the desert….” “I never paid for sex in my life, and I’m not starting now.” And then a less angry, frightened voice, directly at the viewer: “A woman’s curves can mean chafing. The makers of Monistat understand this intimate problem, and are therefore introducing a new, wholly unprecedented product.”
To Beth it seems the young female actresses talk in a new way, the words curling under at the ends of sentences, back into their throats like the start of a gargle, and they seem more natural, or less unnatural and plasticky, than the young men, who look more like mere actors than the women do actresses—more like Ken, Barbie’s opposite-sex partner, than the girls do Barbie. When there are three characters on the screen it is usually two women undercutting each other over a boy-man who stands there squirming with a frozen jaw, and if there are four, one man is older with beautifully grayed hair, like the Before head in commercials for Grecian Formula, and the crosscurrents in the air thicken until the swelling, eerie music rescues them momentarily by signalling that it is time for another cluster of “messages.” Beth is fascinated to think that this is life, all this competing to the point of murder, sex and jealousy and financial greed driving them to it, these supposedly ordinary people in the typical Pennsylvania community of Pine Valley. She’s from Pennsylvania and
never knew a place like it. How has she missed life, so much of it? “My whole life seems just out of my reach,” one character on All My Children once said, maybe Erin. Or Krystal. The remark went right through Beth like an arrow. Loving parents; a happy though not quite conventional marriage; a wonderful only child; intellectually interesting, physically untaxing work checking out books and looking up subjects on the Internet: the world has conspired to make her soft and overweight, insulated against the passion and danger that crackle wherever people truly rub against one other. “Ryan, I want so much to help you, I’d do truly anything; I’d poison your mother for you if you asked.” Nobody says such things to Beth; the most extreme thing that ever happened to her was her parents’ refusing to show up at her civil wedding to a Jew.
The men-boys who receive these burning vows are usually slow to answer. There is an eerie, full quality to the silence in the gap of non-conversation. Beth often fears they have forgotten their lines, but then they say the next thing, after such a long pause. To a degree not true of evening programs—cop shows, comedies, news hours with their bantering desk of four (one male and one female newscaster, a peppy sports reporter, and, the butt of their humor and good-natured grousing, the slightly goofy weatherman)—the daytime soap operas take place against a background of thick, teeming silence, a silence that all the erotic declarations, tense confessions, false assurances, and seething animosities cannot blot out, nor can the otherworldly chiming music and the sudden intervention of the lame pop song that does for a closing theme. A terrifying silence is the ground that holds them all there, like magnets on a refrigerator door, the cast in its echoing three-sided rooms and Beth in her extra-wide armchair, vexed with herself because she did not bring quite enough oatmeal cookies on her plate and now the phone won’t stop ringing so she must abandon her La-Z-Boy island of perfect padded comfort even as David, the impossibly handsome cardiologist ominously uttering charged words to Maria, the gorgeous brain surgeon whose husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Edmund, was murdered in an earlier episode Beth unfortunately missed.
She rises in stages, first pulling the lever to lower the foot-rest and, fighting the rocker motion, transferring her feet to the floor and gripping the left arm of the chair with both hands to tug herself almost up, and finally, with an audible exclamation, heaving her weight onto her braced knees, which slowly, excruciatingly straighten, while she catches her breath. At the start of the process, she thought to place the empty plate on the chair arm safely onto the side table, but she forgot the television remote in her lap, and it falls to the floor. She sees it there, the numbered buttons of its little rectangular panel down with the spots of coffee and spilled food that have accumulated over time on the pale-green carpet. Jack warned her that the carpet would show dirt, but pale wall-to-wall was in that year, the carpet salesman said. “It gives a cool, contemporary look,” he assured her. “It expands the space.” Everybody knows Orientals are best for spots blending in, but when could she and Jack ever afford an Oriental? There’s a place on Reagan Boulevard where you can get them secondhand at a bargain price, but she and Jack never go that way together, it’s where mostly blacks shop. Anyway, used, you don’t know what the previous people have spilled that’s hidden in the fibers, and the idea is distasteful, like carpets in hotel rooms. Beth can’t bear to think of turning her body around and bending over to pick up the remote—her sense of balance is getting worse with age—and there must be some urgent reason why the person on the phone doesn’t hang up. For a while they had an answering machine attached, but there were so many crank calls from parents whose children didn’t get into the colleges Jack advised that they had the machine taken out. “If I’m there, I’ll cope,” he said. “People aren’t so damn nasty when they get an actual voice on the other end.”
Beth takes another step, leaving the people on television to stew in their own abundant juices, and totters to the table by the wall and plucks up the telephone. The new style of telephone stands upright in its cradle, and a little panel below the perforations to listen at supposedly gives you the name and number calling. It says OUT OF AREA, so it’s either Markie or her sister in Washington or some telemarketer calling from wherever they call from—it can be as far away as India. “Hello?” The perforations at the other end of the receiver don’t come to her mouth the way the old phones did, the hefty simple ones of honest black Bakelite that rested face-down in a cradle, and Beth tends to raise her voice because she doesn’t trust it.
“Beth, it’s Hermione.” Herm always sounds ostentatiously brisk, busy, as if to shame her younger, indolent, self-pampered sister. “What took you so long? I was about to hang up.”
“Well, I wish you had.”
“That’s not very nice to say.”
“I’m not like you, Herm. I’m not still fast on my feet.”
“Who’s that talking in the background? Is somebody there?” Her words jump on things, one after another. Yet her bluntness, almost rude, is a welcome leftover from the Pennsylvania-Dutch manner of their girlhood. It reminds Beth of home, of northwest Philadelphia with all its humid greenery and trolley cars and corner grocery stores stacked with Maier’s and Freihofer’s bread.
“It’s the television. I was looking for the clicker to turn it off”—she doesn’t want to admit she was too lazy and unwieldy to bend over and pick it up—“and couldn’t find the gosh-darn thing.”
“Well, go find it. It can’t be far. I can wait. We can’t talk with all that babbling. What were you watching anyway, in the middle of the day?”
Beth puts the receiver down without answering. She sounds like Mother, she thinks, plodding over to where the remote—curiously similar to the telephone in look and feel, matte black and packed with circuitry: a pair of mismatched sisters—lies on its back on the pale-green wall-to-wall. The salesman called it celadon. With a groan of effort, gripping the chair arm with one hand and reaching down with the other in an exertion that reawakens in her little-used muscles the sensation of an exercise, an arabesque penchée, learned in ballet lessons when she was eight or nine, at Miss Dimitrova’s Studio, above a cafeteria downtown on Broad Street, she retrieves the thing and points it at the television screen, where As the World Turns is winding up on Channel Seven, under a cloud of tingling, ominous music. Beth recognizes Craig and Jennifer, in heated conference, and wonders what they are saying even as she clicks them off. They turn into a little star that lingers less than a second.
In ballet class she had been the more lithe and promising sister; Hermione, Miss Dimitrova would say in her scornful White Russian way, lacked ballon. “Light, light,” she would shout, the ligaments jumping in her scrawny throat. “Vous avez besoin de légèreté! Conceive that you are des oiseaux! You are the creatures of air!” Hermione, gawkily tall for her age and already, it was clear, destined to be plain, was the heavy-footed plodder then, and Beth the one who felt, en faisant des pointes, birdlike, whirling with her skinny arms extended.
“You’re panting,” Hermione accuses her when Beth returns to the phone and drops her body with a grunt onto the little hard chair that came in from the kitchen table when Mark was no longer around to eat with his parents. A maple reproduction Shaker, the chair has such a narrow seat that she has to aim her bottom at it; a few years ago she half missed and the chair tipped and dumped her onto the floor. She could have broken her pelvis if she weren’t so well upholstered, Jack said. But he wasn’t amused at first. He rushed over to her horrified and, when she made clear she wasn’t injured, looked disappointed. Hermione asks sharply, “You weren’t watching some special announcement, were you?”
“On the television? No—is there one?”
“No, but”—her hesitation is fraught, like the pauses in soap operas—“there are leaks. Things get out before they should.”
“What’s getting out?” Beth asks, knowing that bland ignorance was the way to open up Hermione, with her itch to lord it over her sister.
“Nothing, dar
ling. I of course can’t say.” But, unable to bear Beth’s silence, she goes on, “Internet chatter is up. We think something’s brewing.”
“Oh, dear,” Beth says docilely. “How’s the Secretary taking it?”
“The poor saint. He’s so conscientious, the whole country on his shoulders, I’m honestly afraid it might kill him. He has high blood pressure, you know.”
“He looks pretty healthy on TV. I wonder, though, if he could use a slightly different haircut. It makes him look belligerent. It puts the Arabs and the liberals on the defensive.” She can’t chase from her mind the image of one more oatmeal-raisin cookie—how it would crumble in her mouth, her saliva leaving the raisins for her tongue to find and fiddle with before she bites down. She used to settle with a cigarette for a phone chat; then the Surgeon General kept telling her it was bad for her, so she gave it up and gained thirty pounds the first year. Why should the government care if the people died? It didn’t own them. That many less to govern, she would think they’d be relieved. But, oh yes, lung cancer was a drain on Medicare, and cost the economy millions of productive work-hours. “I suspect,” Beth offers helpfully, “a lot of this chatter is just high-school and college kids making mischief. Some of them, I know, call themselves Mohammedans just to annoy their parents. There’s this boy at the high school Jack has been advising. He thinks he’s a Muslim because his deadbeat father was, at the same time ignoring this hardworking Irish-Catholic mother he lives with. Think of what our parents would have said if we’d brought home Muslim men to marry.”
“Well, you did the next-best thing,” Hermione tells her, paying her back for the haircut criticism.