Eleanor shrugs. “It only matters how things look.”
“Now you sound like my husband, Mr. Photography.”
“To them, to them, it matters.” The invisible them. The them upstairs with offices and foot-long pens. Eleanor is exasperated with me. She goes out to get a drink of water and doesn’t come back.
When I pull into the driveway, it is late, five o’clock, and the Shubbys next door are having a happy-hour party. Despite the autumnal nip in the air, the guests have spilled out onto the front porch, shouting, dancing, waving cocktail glasses.
“Hey, Benna,” Mr. Shubby calls to me, as I get out of my car. “Come on over.”
“Thanks, but I really can’t,” I call back, though for a split second I consider going. What could it hurt? Some small talk about the New York Film Festival and what I do for a living? I’m not in the mood. I slam the car door and walk across my lawn which is already scaly with leaves. An orangey crimson is settling in all along the street. The cork-bark in the front is in a cold, deep blush.
“Okay, be that way,” Mr. Shubby shouts back. He’s being good-natured. He’s being the life of the party. My arms are full. I smile and shrug. Mrs. Shubby comes out on the porch and signals flirtatiously to her husband. “Irv, you’re needed in here to open a bottle.” She spies me on my own front steps, fumbling for keys. “Benna, dear, why don’t you come join us.” The “dear” is to make me feel like a girl, a foolish girl, an unwed mother.
“Thanks, really,” I say. “Maybe next time.” I find the keys and by this time the whole Shubby porch is waving and calling. “Join the party! Come on!”
“Can’t, sorry.” I slip inside my front door, close it, sink back against it. The party sounds now are distant, deeply buried rumbles and squeals, like something wrong with your car though you can’t figure out what.
The ants sniff and speed around the window frames. They are frightened: It’s October. Like all things without recourse, they scurry, veer off into the walls of their own overpopulation, their own destructiveness, looking for a way out.
Georgie has a note from the school nurse. She might need glasses. I’m supposed to take her to an eye doctor. “I can’t see, I can’t see,” she says, stumbling around the house, deliberately bumping into furniture, arms outstretched and groping stupidly. “Where am I, where am I? Is this the bathroom?” she says, staggering into the kitchen, her eyes squinted almost shut. I am mincing onion for Quick Chili, my own very personal recipe.
“Cute, George,” I say, looking back at my onion. And then because she doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Tell me. What do you think of Darrel? Do you like him?”
She has opened her eyes and is playing with the buckle of her shoe, which she has taken off so she can fly it around like a spaceship. “He’s okay,” she says. “When’s Gerard comin’ over?”
The last argument I had with my husband was about intelligence and sexual fidelity in marriage. “An intelligent person does everything with ambivalence,” he said. “Strictly speaking, fidelity can never be a given.” We were in front of a drugstore. In the window was a Russell Stover candies display. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was this the difference between men and women? That women could never believe their ears?
“No!” I shouted. “That’s just not true. An intelligent person has an intelligent faith, and when an intelligent person decides to do something, it’s done unambivalently, unequivocally, intelligently. Why the hell did we get married? Sexual fidelity must always be a given!” Strictly speaking strictly. Whenever I’m furious, the only vocabulary I can come up with are words that have been spoken in the last thirty seconds. My sentences become anagrams of the sentences before. “Intelligent people are not ambivalent people.” He was being an asshole, so I would be one too. I would ask him to love me unambivalently, to love me in theory, to love me unambivalently in theory as I shouted at him in front of dozens of persons, persons in cars, persons with newspapers under their arms, and Russell Stover gift boxes and friction pour le bain in bags coming out of the drugstore, sick, ailing persons with unfilled prescriptions going in, persons walking by, putting up umbrellas, persons turning on their windshield wipers. How could he help but be ambivalent about our marriage? I think, in fact, that right then and there, in front of the drugstore, was where and when his ambivalence ended. I think that is when he became unambivalent and unequivocal and decided he didn’t want to be married to me anymore.
We never made it into the drugstore. I forget what we were going there to get. We went back to the car, to our Rabbit bandaged in bumper stickers. It was starting to drizzle, and we each slammed doors and didn’t talk to, look at, or touch each other. I stared at the glove compartment knob. He started the car, started the windshield wipers, and we drove home. He twitched in his jaw; I could see it in my peripheral vision. There was a purity to the hate, to the determination. It continued for twelve hours. Then, the next morning when both of us were in the bathroom, brushing our teeth and dressing for work, he said, “I never want to see you again,” only I misheard him at first and thought he’d said, “I want to see again.”
When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Cosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. When you wanted someone to say “I love you,” approximate assemblages—igloo, eyelid glue, isle of ewe—however lovely, didn’t quite make it. “You are my honey bunch” was not usually interchangeable with “You are my bunny hutch.” In a New York suburban bathroom, early in the morning, a plea for sight could twist, grow slightly, re-issue itself as an announcement of death.
“You want to see again?” I asked, incredulous. His vision had always been fine. And he looked at me. He was standing in front of the sink. Then he looked into the drain, the stopped-up drain. He shook his head and said, “I never want to see you again.”
“Oh,” I said, three syllables short, where had they gone? Zapped by the ray-gun of a mumble. “Oh. I thought you said, ‘I want to see again.’ ” And I grabbed some Merthiolate from the medicine cabinet and went back into the bedroom and painted peace signs all over my thighs. A few minutes later he came in and, looking like someone about to spit, lifted our largest red Samsonite bag down from the closet shelf and loaded it with as much stuff from his dresser as he could. He never came back for anything else. I had turned into a bitch, and he had turned into a man with a fire-engine-red suitcase marching off toward the commuter train, looking as if he might spit. The last thing he said was, “What the fuck are you doing to your legs?”
I did cry. I didn’t think I’d really turned into a bitch. I thought he was in love with someone else. And the Merthiolate took three days of hot baths to come off. Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.
Georgie and I go to Woolworth’s to buy barrettes. We walk almost aimlessly up and down the aisles, Georgie singing a song she thinks she’s heard on The Best of Broadway: “ ‘When you walk through a store hold your head up high …’ ”
In the housewares aisle she teaches me songs she has learned at school. Most of them have trees and flowers
and animals in them. I think at peace talks and arms negotiations all those magisterial, overweight men should be forced to sing such rounds of “White Coral Bells” and “Lady Bug, Lady Bug.” It might save us. How afterward could those same men lumber gruffly off to go press buttons, lily of the valley decking their garden walks, checking their misfired testosterone.
I have fantasies. Such plans, such hopes. Walk on, walk on with holes in your heart.
George pulls a damp Band-Aid from her pinky and shows me the crinkled fish skin beneath. “Little white fish pinky,” she sings and dances it in the air, her finger sticking upright like a startled periscope.
At Hank’s I ask Gerard if he scribbled on my Mme. Charpentier. He looks at me and his mouth drops; a small cave opens up in his beard. He is clearly appalled. “Why the hell would I do something like that?”
I’m sorry I’ve asked him. I don’t dare tell him that George suggested it. She, of course, is the logical suspect.
“Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t really thinking, I just thought I’d ask, I wasn’t really serious.” I try to change the subject. “How’s the singing going?”
Gerard beams widely and I’m relieved. “Just the news I was going to break. I’ve landed a part with the Free Verdi Company. I’m Don José in Carmen.”
“But that’s not Verdi.”
“That’s not the point. Jesus, Benna. You’re supposed to say congratulations. I get to kill the soprano.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “You’re going to be great at it. I can feel it in my bones.” I lean over the table, my sleeve dragging in some coffee, and give him a kiss.
Thursday I take George to Dr. Nintz, the eye doctor. George has grown suddenly frightened. She doesn’t understand how she’s supposed to look into the eye machine. Dr. Nintz smiles and shows her. “Tell me what’s in the top row,” he says.
“A, F, T …” Her voice is a whisper, a speck. For someone just beginning to read, the wordless arrangement of the letters must be scary, jumbled together like a foreign language, like the names of Indian tribes.
“You’ll have to speak louder than that, dear,” says the doctor.
Afterward we go to the optician’s with Dr. Nintz’s prescription and pick out frames. She tries on five different kinds and looks in the mirror as if she’s not really seeing. Perhaps she’s perplexed at her own reflection. She doesn’t seem to care what frames she gets.
“Which do you like best, kiddo?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. Mom, you choose.”
“I like these.” I point to a pair of clear whitish frames with silver hinges.
“Okay,” she says.
I remember having to get glasses when I was young, though my mother always took me to an eye clinic for examinations. I had to stand in line with about a dozen other children, and then we were raced through the eye charts, holding, in turn, one hand over each of our eyes. We had to indicate which way the E was going by indicating up, down, left, right with the hand that wasn’t covering up the eye. I always thought that the E stood for “eye” and its different positions were the four different ways your eyes could be impaired. (That was also back in the days when I thought the ice cream man lived in his truck.) My mother had once worked at the clinic; she thought it a fine place. I hated it. Later, as an adult, I tried to justify my hatred philosophically if not economically: a clinic was an unfortunate symbol of our entire society, a stark, fluorescent hieroglyph; every experience and institution was a virtual clinic, always looking over its shoulder, saying “Next?” and diminishing us all; whether it was love or art or graduate school or genetics or history or Auschwitz, there were always too many forms, too many people both ahead of and behind you in line, so close you could hear their gurgling and breathing and the impatient shifting of their weight from foot to foot. If George had been scared at Dr. Nintz’s office, I certainly wasn’t ever going to take her to an eye clinic.
Five days later we pick up the actual glasses. She wears them out of the optician’s office, unsure and clutching my arm. “They feel funny, but I can see better, Mom. Wow.” And she begins itemizing things, the rags of leaves on trees, on sidewalks, the headlights of cars.
“You look very pretty,” I tell her.
· · ·
From the backyard I am taking in the evening: The trees on the horizon release the moon, upward, the electric egg of the moon in a slow ovulation across the sky, lone as a diamond, as one bad eye roaming.
The ants are my friends. They’re blowing in the wind.
When Darrel stays over, we don’t talk about our ex-spouses or the war or anything. We compare Donald Duck imitations.
“Yours is good,” I say, lying next to him, naked and goose-fleshed. Duck-bumped.
“Here,” says Darrel. “I’ll teach you how to do Donald Duck when he’s mad,” and he lets loose with a blustery duck noise that vibrates the whole bed. “Try it,” he says.
“What do you do?”
“You just do the same voice, only you shake your head back and forth real fast.”
I try, but it comes out with a lot of spit, and Darrel laughs at me. “Oh, well,” he says.
“Sorry. This is the sort of thing I’m usually quite good at. I must be having an off day.” And then I do my imitation of Julie Andrews at the automat—which Darrel finds quite astounding in its way.
I am walking to my last class of the day, my Darrel class. The October air is breezy and clear, like a day at the beach. The trees have shed a large crunchy tea all around campus and a few students are lying out on it, faces closed and aimed at the sun. The dogs love this kind of weather. They are out, also, frolicking around, nibbling at each other. I’m afraid of them and hope they stay where they are and don’t romp too close to the sidewalk. You can’t trust dogs. They always look like they’re smiling. They spot each other from blocks away and dash to put their noses in each other’s groin. They know things about you that no one else does, things you haven’t told them but that they sense—that you are menstruating, that you are scared—and they take advantage.
In class the teacher distributed a student poem which began: “The autumn of adulthood turneth brown.” These kids thought they were writing the Bible. It madeth her ill. It madeth her lie down in green pastures, it madeth her that ill.
In the back Darrel said something to Melanie Masters and they both laughed. She was young, dainty, pretty as a Seventeen magazine. She needed practice in the art of missing belt loops. The teacher felt herself flush, her heart pound, and she looked away, at someone else, at someone else who had his hand raised and was about to say that when talking about getting older you don’t need to say both autumn and brown, one implies the other.
How had this happened? One Kafkaesque day she’d woken up and discovered she was a teacher at a community college, the perpetrator of a public fraud. The faces all about her seemed suddenly to alter and flicker in the light like mother-of-pearl. She had nothing to say to them. She had nothing to say and ended the class early.
The teacher walked across campus toward where her car was parked. She was going to have her hair trimmed. Sometimes all her existential crises became focused on her hair; she would look in the mirror and see it zooping out all over the place and say in a level voice, “I don’t think that I can go on.” And then she would try to rescue her life, herself, by a visit to a beauty parlor.
She passed a student she had had last year, and smiled, said hello. The student, however, looked at her blankly, as if he’d never seen her before in his life. How is it, thought the teacher, that I can remember this guy—his first name, his last name, his ottava rima about “the chicken pox of the soul”—and he seems not to recall me at all?
In the hairdresser’s I smile at Yvette. I assume she remembers me, she’s done my hair before, but she seems to smile right through me, no ripple of recognition. Yet we’d worked up a kind of intimacy once, hadn’t we? We’d talked about men and ovaries and the effect of smoking on hair follicles. Now she doe
sn’t seem to know me from Adam. She massages my scalp, just as she did then. “What will it be?” she says. She runs her fingers through and through my hair.
At night my insomnia lies next to me, on the floor by the bed, like a cousin come to visit.
“I know you’re really crazy about me, kid,” I say to Darrel, who is also there and who doesn’t seem to notice the cousin. Darrel is on his side, turned away from me. I rest my head on his hip. “I know ya really are.” I have worked up a fake voice for this. It’s part Mae West, part pain reliever commercial. His eyes are closed. He turns to hold me, whimpers softly, then lets go, says nothing, rolls with all the blankets and slips promptly into sleep. I feel as if I’m in a war, lying in a trench with a dead person next to me, while the sky peels open in bright browns and reds like surgery.
Already we have settled into the tomb and heavy sleep of premature marriage. We brush our teeth in front of each other. We floss before bed.
I clasp my bare breasts to make sure that they’re still there.
Oh, where is the snooze of yesteryear?
Where are the negligées downtown?
II
“You have a choice,” she told her class. “The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.” On the board she wrote the words horror, nothingness, onomatopoeia.
There are reasons why Darrel and I don’t talk about the war, not the least of which is my own past. While he was off fighting and choking and hurling cognac against walls, I attended one campus sit-in, chanted “Hell no we won’t go” a lot, and then went home and read Mademoiselle magazine. I never threw things, I never said “pig,” I voted, my first time ever, for Humphrey, which later I was told was consummately unhip (“Benna, he was Johnson’s stoolie!”). Two friends of a friend of mine were trotting around New York with pocketbooks packed with homemade bombs and leaving them at government buildings. I, too, hated the war. But I drank too much beer and took midday pajama naps. I memorized passages from Romeo and Juliet. I actually liked the song “Cherish.” I had a loose yarn bag with a long shoulder strap and in it I kept only Kleenex, a comb, blusher, and a pack of Salems. On our way to Woodstock my college boyfriend and I got stuck in traffic and never made it to the festival. We turned around and went home, had supper at a dairy bar. To this day when I think of the sixties, I think of ersatz jazz renditions of “A Taste of Honey,” of Sergio Mendes’s “Fool on the Hill,” of dairy bars with vanilla egg creams.