Beyond Deserving (8 page)

You understand how precious your own ordinary, happy, pocked life is. Every day, you have some reason to be, some moment when you are, grateful.

15

The yellow sticky-backed note on the wall by Katie's phone says, “Geneva/napkins/W.” Katie hangs up and peels off the note, crumples it and drops it in the brown paper bag by the refrigerator. Cautiously, she leans across the airspace above the bag and sniffs lightly. She accumulates so little garbage, she sometimes forgets to put it outside, and tuna cans, discarded bologna, stale bread, and crumpled take-out boxes have a way of festering and then erupting into full blown stench. This bag is less than half-full, and holds only paper, yogurt containers, and coffee grounds. She has not eaten at home in days. She snacks on the leftovers brought home by her neighbor Maureen, who is a cook in a vegetarian deli. She nibbles crackers and dry cereal without milk. She goes out with her lover, Jeff, and eats what he has chosen, agreeing always that it is delicious. She learned to eat anything, without complaint, from living with Fish; Fish used odd food to test her spunkiness. She has eaten sardines, sushi, several kinds of game, black mushrooms, Chinese soup with chicken feet, roots, berries and wild greens gathered while camping. Whenever she has spent time alone, she hasn't known what she wanted. Sometimes when Fish was gone, she ate nothing except a meal once a day where she worked.

Her lover is an agricultural geneticist. He has developed an orange baby cauliflower. A crop is growing right now, hydroponically, at the agricultural experimental station. A few years ago he helped develop a delicate, blush-red pear. These pears are grown here, in this valley, but they must be further modified, for a hardier fruit, to withstand shipping. Since she learned about this exotic pear, Katie has looked forward with increasing longing to the late summer harvest, thinking of it at odd, inappropriate moments, such as during lovemaking, or as she attaches braided trim to an officer's jacket for the Chekhov production. She prefers thoughts of the pear to thoughts of her lover. Meanwhile, Jeff's attention has turned to grapes. He praises the conditions in the region, saying they are just right for producing varietals as good as in the Napa and Sonoma areas. Small wineries have sprung up all over. A Frenchman has even gone into partnership with a retired movie special-effects man to make a local brandy. Jeff says vintners are interesting people. He doesn't comment on wine drinkers.

It occurs to Katie that Jeff may see her as yet another hybrid, perhaps a wild fruit brought into the station for domestication. He professes delight in her somewhat out-of-date personal style (the long, straight hair, usually in braids or a ponytail; her “clear-washed”—his phrase—makeupless face, her disdain for hose, bra, slip, jewelry). At the same time, he brings her gifts obviously chosen to improve the appearance he claims charm him. He gives her lacquered hairclips and a straight linen skirt, a pale gray charmeuse slip, a fine gold chain, and perfume. He asks her about prospects for training in costuming, as if he cannot perceive her contentment as a seamstress-lackey who presses seams, sews velcro in garments for quick strips, stitches decorative trims, and the like. She does not try to tell him how like a resigned stepchild she is, working among women who have college degrees in theatre, or certificates of design and garment construction, portfolios of fiber art. Even the few other local women who were hired purely as seamstresses have vastly more experience than she, and keen ambition. They buy their own copies of books like
Flat Patternmaking
, and
An Encyclopedia of World Costumes
, books that make Katie's eyes tear from the strain of reading them. She lets Jeff make what he wants of her modest position. She doesn't blame him; everyone assumes something extraordinary about people who work in the theatre, even if their jobs involve mailing brochures and selling tickets.

Though Katie only mildly wonders about Jeff's affection for her (whatever he says, she believes it is sexual), she is increasingly bewildered by her growing attachment to him, not so much emotionally as practically. He has begun to direct more and more aspects of her life. He takes for granted their coupleship, when she is still married to another man. She knows she has let this happen, that his behavior has intensified since Fish returned and she continued to maintain her own place to live. When she did not find a way to resume residence with her husband, she let Jeff assume a kind of authority over her, without ever deciding to do so, and lately it has begun to vex her. She especially minds the way he has begun to ask her questions about her life: whether Fish ever hit her, if she ever wanted children (he doesn't know about Rhea). He asks her questions like, “What worries you most in life?” She replies, “Earthquakes and spiders,” trying not to smirk. In turn, he tells her about himself. He tells her how he used to be terrified of water, how hard it was to learn to swim, which he now does well. Late one night, he tells her about the time in graduate school when he stole the idea of a paper from an old master's thesis. He is quick to say it wasn't really plagiarism—in the end he wrote every word—but he feels guilty that he leaned so far that way. He says he thinks the experience has been for the best, that it has made him a more moral man. He talks about essays he reads in
Esquire
on friendship among men, sportsmanship, medical ethics. He seems to want her to prize his candor, but she is often bored and distracted, and cannot appreciate it when he says he talks to her more intimately than he has to other women.

She wonders how he can be so wrong about her, what need in him has invented her. She claims intimacy, in all the world, only with Fish, and it has come not so much from mutual disclosure as from years of accumulated, shared experience. From their shared dreams, now faded. From their shared debts, as to her mother, and losses, as Rhea. From the ways they have tried not to be the persons their parents shaped, using one another to fight history and habit and proclivity.

She has her own life to think about, and cannot envision revealing it to Jeff. She is weary with trying to analyze her own behavior, though she has yet to find any clear direction in the effort. She often feels a clutch in her thinking, like a case of mental cramps.

She cannot really remember making the decision to divorce Fish. The impulse was hers (and not Jeff's). It is not the first time she has considered it. She remembers Ursula suggesting it—tentatively, to be sure—years before. What Ursula said was, “You can decide how you want to live. You don't have to keep on like this.” What crisis was she in then, to garner such advice from Ursula? She cannot recall, it does not matter, except that no one seems to understand why Katie has stayed with Fish anyway. Her mother is in a state of perpetual surprise that the marriage has “lasted.”

This time, though, the idea came to her one particular evening last December, when it was rainy and cold, and she was sopping with self-pity and resentment that Fish was in jail and not with her. She tried the idea out on Ursula later—not long after she met Jeff, true—and something in saying it out loud gave it authenticity. “I could divorce him,” she remembers thinking. “I've already got a boyfriend,” a fact that, though it may have greased the wheels on which her notion rode, hardly gave it substantial argument. Then she grew piqued that Fish would not write her and would not let her come see him. “I'll show him.” She may have thought that.

Besides, getting a divorce from a difficult man will please the critics (only her mother comes instantly to mind), will appear as a “step in the right direction,” when all along she has been bobbing in her life like a plastic duck in a tub of water.

Only this morning, as she moves around, dressing and making her bed, drinking coffee and picking at her nails, she is overwhelmed by the fierceness of her relief—almost elation—that she has intervened in time to stop the papers being served on Fish. It is as if some third party has set the divorce in motion, and she has put out her arm to stop the speeding train.

Relieved as she is, perhaps because she knows she will be seeing Fish on Saturday, she feels very much on his side.

16

It is after six when Ursula gets home.

She is surprised to find Michael in the kitchen, staring off in the direction of the back yard. The radio is on too low to hear. He is missing his beloved
All Things Considered
.

“Hi,” she says. She sees that he has washed up from breakfast. She also sees that Carter has been through. An open peanut butter jar sits surrounded by crumbs, with a dirty knife alongside. She wants to sound chatty. Michael doesn't like to be probed. But she wonders what he is thinking, even if she does have a master's in counseling and knows people have a right to inner privacy. Space. Whatever you call it. Michael's seems so vast and pristine, and thus so alluring.

“Caught you idle,” she manages to say.

“The back yard is shabby,” he replies. “I was wondering if I ought to build some sort of patio out under the sycamore. Or a gazebo.” He will be looking for a summer project, of course. “Or do you think the sycamore sheds too much, that I'd be brushing away seed balls half the year?”

“You already do.” Ursula is pleased with this train of thought. Sometimes she is appalled by the shabbiness of their house. They can afford to fix it up. She ought to have someone in to clean it properly now and then. They have stuffed it and piddled at minor remodeling efforts, but it is a house in need of attention. Or a move. Could Michael be talked into a new house? She imagines expanses of bare white wall, water running through smooth new pipes. A shower.

“The porch is okay,” Michael muses. Fish built it for them a couple of years ago. It is a wide, bare-wood affair with latticework along two sides, and a partial roof, and bentwood benches built in the shade. Ursula was thrilled with that project, too. She envisioned herself holding soirees in the late summer evenings. And not just social workers (Michael hates their talk), but people from the college and the theatre. Some of these transplanted hip California types, with their sound studios and art galleries. Of course she doesn't know those people, and she never seems to have any time. They don't even invite Michael's fellow teachers over. And last summer the family didn't eat outside five times. It was silly of them. All they need is a few of those cheap lawn chairs, already stacked up for sale like hats at K-Mart.

“It's going to be summer soon,” she says softly. She always has hopes this time of year. She always thinks life will slow down. In some ways it does, because Michael is off from school, but the children spend their time with their own lives now, and her work goes on as always, whatever the season. Then many days are so hot you can't move until eight o'clock at night.

In a new house she'd have air-conditioning.

“We need a couple of trees with some color. Crab apple? Red maples? Something Japanese and expensive, like down at the park? We need more shade. And some perennials. It would be easy to spend a lot of money on the yard.” Michael shakes his head and looks at Ursula. He isn't really inviting her comment; he has said what he thinks. “Juliette called. She's staying at Marina's to work on French.”

She will call Marina's in a while. She likes to know where Juliette is. She has to call Katie, too.

“We can afford some new trees, Michael,” she says.

Michael doesn't say anything.

Ursula pulls up a stool and sits down beside him. “Is something wrong?”

He is scuffing at the floor with his toe. He pulled up the old vinyl two months ago. They walk around on the plywood subfloor, waiting for him to put down the gray rubber he thinks will look and wear so well. “It'll cushion us while we work,” he said, as if they were gourmet cooks. The rubber is in a roll in the basement. All of Michael's projects have this kind of dead space somewhere in the doing. It is a Fisher hallmark. Gully once housed his family in a garage for a year, before he got around to attaching a house to it.

Michael sighs noisily. “Today at school Wilson told me that next year I can't build crystal radios with my kids. Can't set up electric trains, or put out birdhouses. No greenhouse. No park maps. Just math, reading, spelling. The straight stuff. He never got it. I thought we were past that shit.”

He teaches junior high kids who can't get along in regular classes. He gets along with the kids fine. Kids who couldn't pass general math do all the measuring and cutting for the birdhouses. And those birdhouses—scattered in the woods for bluebirds as nesting sites—have brought good publicity to the district.

Ursula sits up straighter. She is good at solving problems. As her supervisor says, she has a practical mind. Chances are somebody has been rubbed wrong because Michael's kids have a better time of it in the school. (He often says they run the place like a boot camp.) She can type up a memo for Michael, if they work it out tonight. A memo to the principal. Later, if need be, he can write the board. He can enclose copies of the newspaper articles about his bluebird project, which has gone on for several years now. There is a terrific photograph of a seventh-grader with an officer from the local Audubon Society.

“A memo,” is all she gets out. He saw the gears turning. He holds his hand up. “There are only three more weeks left of the year! Nobody is going to settle anything in three weeks. All they can do in that amount of time is dictate.” He turns his palms up. “See, I've let it go.”

Letting go
is not Michael's expression, it is hers. So is he laughing at her? At least he seems to have relaxed. Maybe he meant what he said.

“I see.” She will bring it up later, if he lets her. Actually, she is exhausted now. She runs her tongue along the ridge of aggravated flesh inside her cheek, where she bit herself biting into a turkey sandwich at lunch. She wasn't able to finish it. So she is hungry, too.