On Keeping Women (14 page)

They understand her too, except perhaps Maureen. An enormous warmth oozes in her, surprised. Not pride. Self-esteem, which with their half-formed slips of hands, from their bony young hearts, they are giving back to her.

“It’s old Markie. Here, Ma. That hee-hee way she talks.”

Old Markie in to do her chores in the night-cool, as is her habit because of her huge fat, is glad to tell her tale. “Yeh, he been. Flew in from the Islands last Tuesday. Bring some beautiful brown people with him. Party last for two days, looks like. Shrimp jambalaya all over the kitchen.” From the sound of her, she’s eating up the leftovers, more than food included. “Hee-yah, one of them long-legged coffee-beans, I say to her, ‘You make me look like Italian roast.’ I come in, they just leaving. That girl, she say to your brother ‘I fly home with you all the way from Bridgetown. Now you fly me back.’ And you know, honey, he done just that. Hee-yah.”

“Bridgetown,” she said, hanging up. “Can’t be Long Island.”

“No, Ma,” her eldest said. “Barbados.”

“He told us about the rain-forests,” Royal said. “I want to go.”

“Bet you do. Bet you will.” She reached out a finger to smooth Royal’s jawline. “Have to hand it to your Uncle James. He leads the logical life.”

They stare, stolidly.

“Do we have to believe him then? About Daddy?”

A pious girl, my Maureen. Obeying all instruction, even mine. What more can be done?

“Not on your life, kids,” she said, too trashy-loud for this muted medical hall. “He’s just organizing. You don’t have to believe a word he says.”

On the Monday, she went in to quit her job.

“Kids need me until their father comes home,” she tells Hoppe, who has come out himself to give her the paycheck due. “And Dorothy can come back soon anyway—you’ll get along.”

“I’m sure I will. But, I was figuring on offering you the job permanently.”

“Me? But I couldn’t do that to Dorothy.”

He shrugs. “She’ll get along. You write better prose.”

“Excuse me—but is that the professional way of looking at things? Or yours? I really want to know.”

“Why?”

“Because it numbs me, sort of.” From this humanist.

“Why are you so ally-pally with Dorothy all of a sudden? You scarcely know her.”

“I can tell you.” His voice has risen. She can hear the cubicles listening. “Because she had a hysterectomy.”

“I—well—yes it is a bond.” She can see the male flare in his eye. “Even though I haven’t had one yet. But like Kotex, you mean. And breast cancer. And the pill.”

What a strange bond that must be, she thought, half-dreaming. That other cloister, that I never really got into, that way. Of women chained in lockstep against birth. Has he children by the sewing-woman—wouldn’t he have said? I don’t feel them—the loosening breadth that comes of them—in that narrow psyche of his. Or is it only we women whom the children make helpless to life? But why do I let him take for granted what
I
do, may have done? Why don’t I crow it at him—Cockadoodle keroo, boys—
birth.
Why do I never?

“Hoppe.” She heard her voice, silky. “Hoppe. Do I write good prose?”

“Better than we need.” He wears custom shirts, the white stripe-on-stripe expanding with the breath. “But we’d make use of it. The way we did of Dorothy’s social connections. Old county ones. You don’t have those. But you could write a column say, called Woman’s Word.” He points the pipestem at her. “And yes, before you ask, that’s my viewpoint. And the professional one. And the male one. ’Swhat you want me to say, isn’t it.”

When he smirks, the wens don’t go along with it. Answer
them.

“I couldn’t. That’s junk.”

“Journalism. It’s what I do.”

She ignores that. In her way she’s persistent, and knows it. “If I could do—like I said the other night. The real business. Underneath the words. All those feverish details we’re all so ashamed of. The tiny knife-moves we make in the dark.” Which never strike.

“That interior of yours? Unilateral nonsense—without the rest of us. All right, I’ll go further. Only nonsense. Without the men.”

“Being unilateral can be a strength. It is for you and Ray.”

The name checks her, him too.

“But it’s true—” she mutters, squinting at him as if he is both of them “—you don’t like our voyaging.” And draws a long, shuddering relieved breath. Surprised by the power that comes of speaking from one’s own symbols. Even when unsure of what they are.

All this time she’s been holding the boxed gift she has for him. Why does she always do this to people? A placation? Or a wild slap?

“I—I do want to be a humanist, like you … I can’t afford it yet.” She’s fumbled it out low, to the box. Maybe he can’t hear her. “I’m going to read him though. I looked him up in the Encyclopedia last night. Rousseau.”

Hoppe shakes his head with an “Ach.” Throws up his hands. “I’ll say this for you. You don’t whine.”

Oh, poor Lexie. You almost dropped the box you’d hung onto so daintily, the way we do with presents too much mulled, too earnestly shopped for, too prettily wrapped. He’d taken away the mirror you looked into endlessly—spotty and chapped, imperfectly silvered with the past, but honestly yours, you’d thought. And had turned you to that other one, cool and fresh from the glazier, which most people patronize.

“Why—I’m always whining,” you said. “I whine all the time. Inside.”

You stepped forward so aggressively you knocked poor Hoppe’s pipe from his grasp. “I screamed bloody murder, when I had the kids.”

And it’s true, then. Nobody hears.

She picked up the pipe then. Handing him the package along with it. “Here. A present. For teaching me a lot.”

“Did I?” Yes, he looks like Punch, when he’s pleased. Or Pinocchio, grown literate. “What’s this? Dried fruit!”

An assortment of the finest icy pineapple wheels, copper apricots, and apple-quarters newly come from Russia according to the shopkeeper, rosy little cheek-slices from some Siberian tot. He picked up the cheap black, tin tray she’d added from the dime-store. What’s this?”

“For the pips.”

For the wife to carry it, the way his mother did. But why do we all elaborate so?—she wants to ask him.

“Lexie. You really are something. Too bad you did have kids.”

Deep in her, the lioness roar begins stretching. Unable, of course, to reach the tinkle from her lips. “Th-think so?”

“Sure. You could have been somebody.”

She takes a long bet. Humanism like this has to come from somewhere.

“Too bad you didn’t, Hoppe? Then so could you?”

Somebody in a cubicle cracks his gum.

She drives home with her paycheck on the seat beside her. Thinking of whether she’s learned anything useful about acts.

And all this time, she performs her household duties well.

On the night of the Kellihy party, James comes up his brother-in-law’s front steps. Huddled as his sister is, in the wicker chair back of the pingpong table on the porch’s side wing, he doesn’t see her. So he’s back.

She lets him walk unchallenged into the house, which is lit up like an ark behind her, hears him call for the children and not find them; now he must be settling down, to wait. James isn’t one to imagine himself on a ship whose hands have murdered one another, leaving every hatch stuffed with a staring head—or have vanished, leaving one fly drowned in a glass of milk. Should he come to one or the other conclusion, he’ll write it down for the monthly meeting. Still, she’ll let him simmer in there. Until her anger has shrunk merely to him. Or is manageable. Or is gone.

Which is still a matter of getting back her own jokes, of feeling the power to make them fully reposed in her, as the flashy side of that inmost treasure, the strength to honor her own seriousness. In the past weeks, what’s she been doing but poking about in her own ash-heaps, so that like a neophyte yoga recruit she may fold her limbs on the embers. Like a kind of daily housework it is, psychological. She’ll be ever-grateful to the real housework for protecting her efforts, masking them. She’s begun to understand what a nun is, or a monk-philosopher of the absolute—whose every act must reflect what is believed. I am the fieldworker, not in the house of the Lord, but of the family. Not that she’s got it right—that fullness. Or ever will. But when she has settled in her mind and fingertips what the balance should be, should have been, but in this household never will be—then she can go.

Reaching out to the housewall, she turns the porch-light on, off, on, off, like a signal at sea.

James comes out, without a word. It seems to her that he is stepping through wave after wave of that other family-at-sea which has floated her here. And him.

“So you’re back. From Barbados.” And without the girl. That game must have stopped. “Didn’t hear you drive up.”

“Drove up with a friend.”

Because he knows he’s in her bad graces, instead of sprawling brotherlike on the only chaise, as usual, and idly chastening her, as family does, from there, he disposes himself on the porch steps, leaning up to her like a stage lover. “Solid with cars here already. Had to park down the road.”

“The swimming-pool’s being consecrated.”

“For the ages, apparently. Yeah, I heard.”

He’s driven up for the party, then. Not merely for a party’s complex of people, which will always draw her, but for his exhausting instalment-plan pursuit of girls. Who will never stay with him until they’re fully paid for.

For as long as she can remember, the minute she sees James with a girl, she’s inside the girl, in bed with that freckly-white long muzzle and tawn of hair—and staring up. And not liking it, thank God. But then I do that with most men, don’t I, even older ones. I’m always the girl in bed, staring up. Waiting for them to say what.

“Going to be a moon,” he says. “Funny how you can see its luster on the water, long before it comes.”

The trees bulge over the road, heat-monsters come to lap at the waterhole.

“Oh yes, it’s going to be a night. There’s always one hot night when—it hits.” And the moths know, and the birds, and all the other August-stretching animals—why shouldn’t we? This is
tonight.

Next door, no panes of glass are being smashed, tonight. Yards away as Kellihys’ is, the vanilla wind of a party—even one where there’ll be only whisky—is blowing out of all its doors. One can almost hear the crepe-paper rustle of the skirts the girls won’t be wearing, the sweet soak of all the old party-sounds that confetti the mind.

She glances over there—no colors yet. This isn’t to be a party where spongecake sopped in maraschino juice is the height. The children have been sent away from it. All down the road.

Drum-drum, skit-skat and blurt of voices now; those must be the caterers. Hard voices, caterers’ men have, with the caretaking quality of male nurses. When she went over this afternoon they were just standing about, three men and a boy, in this one-night stand of a zoo they’ve found themselves in. Tough customers, down to the boy, with the smirk of late-hours hired help. Yet the disc-swish now starting up from over there is pure movie-tone, that old-fashioned ocean-sound they make with airbrushes. And even the silence bits—cornstarch snow. Smash no panes, tonight.

“Charles hung up on me yesterday. When I phoned.”

The children have declared for her. That’s been squeezing her. Maureen, offering her lunch on a tray. Charles without a word washing the car. When that rain came, Royal closed every window in the house. And Chessie, looking like any other girl in pink lipstick and a sailordress—she knows how they look, well enough—went into the city, yesterday, to hunt a job. Calling back brightly, as she ran for the bus “If I get it, I’ll commute.” They’ve declared for her, Lexie—who is the house.

“Lexie. Have you heard from him?”

“The usual. It was just late. But I’d already had the furnace checked, and paid the insurance premiums … The Spanish nuns who run the place he’s in continue to be kind. Sister Isaac Jogues, the one who trained in France, has had shingles, but little can be done for her; she’s seventy-eight.” And that disease, like his, must run its course. “Love to you and to the children.” Whom he takes care to mention specifically. And a drawing for Royal. Of what he sees from his window. “Once he wrote ‘Regards’ instead of ‘Love,’ but crossed it out.”

“Lexie. Don’t you see? He’s ciphering himself out.”

Can a cipher do that?

“I had to warn the kids,” James said. “Somebody has to. You just dream on.”

“Somebody has to.”

He sighs. “You don’t change.”

An odd, whinnying sound comes from the Kellihys, a high-speed motor, from inside the house. They’re sawing wood in there, maybe, for the biggest bonfire of all, stripping the window-ledges, piling on the attic-trunks—the one with the hidden jewelry even—as they go. Or they’re whipping up one enormous whiskey-sour to spout from all seven chimneys and fill the pool with such a tincture that we may drink as we swim.

“Dreaming big over there,” he says.

“Mmm. If news of the party reached Barbados.”

“No. Bob’s brother, the one who lives in the Village. The philosophy professor. We have a mutual friend. Who drove up with me.”

Some woman they share? Is he grinning? She can’t quite see.
“You
don’t change.”

A burst of laughter, from the brother-sister fount. Briefly, they grip hands.

He slides gratefully up and onto the chaise. “May marry that Bajun girl. Markie approves. For me, that is. But she told the girl on the sly ‘You stay black, better. Everybody already want to be: lookit they hair.’ … Yes, I may fly back.”

“After the party.”

Yes, he’s grinning.

“Well ’ray for Markie, anyway. Maybe all women are anthropologists.”

“Huh?”

Everything she says to James is awkward, pedantic, but part of her. “Been studying it.”

“At that college?”

“No. Recording privately. In the house. Oh James—this house. Sometimes it’s an igloo, with everybody learning how not to freeze the nose. From ordinary human contact. Other times it’s Tierra del Fuego—everybody warm as French toast … It is hot there, isn’t it?”

“Never been.”